The 7 Best Internet Speed Test Sites

This article about ‘The 7 Best Internet Speed Test Sites’ has been written and brought to you by BroadbandSearch.

1. The importance of Internet Connection Speed

A fast internet connection is a necessity of modern life. The UN declared a connection a human right. Schools expect students to have a fast connection. They are the ones to enjoy most of the technological benefits of the last two decades. Yet how fast of a connection do you have?

Your internet speed can determine how much time it takes you to perform vital tasks online, such as how connected you can remain to the outside world. Your choice of internet plan and the provider is perhaps one of the most important ones you’ll make for your household. You need to have at least a reasonably fast connection.

Here are a few facts on modern internet usage to showcase the importance of having a solid connection in 2019:

• According to Pew Research, 89 percent of U.S. Adults use the internet in some capacity. All but 2 to 3 % of adults aged 18-49 use the internet. The senior (65+) population is the only outlying group, with only 66 percent of them using the internet in 2018.
• Home broadband is common. While the number of broadband users has just about evened out over the past five years (it trends from 65-73 %, with 65 % in 2018), it remains a staple of the US household. We noticed that there is an increasing number of adults who do not have broadband, but do use smartphones (20 % in 2018).
• According to Speedtest.net, fixed broadband download speeds throughout the world on average increased 26.5 % from 2017-2018. The average download speed is now 46.12 Mbps, and the upload speed is 22.44 Mbps. Companies are basing their services on these metrics. Even if optimization is important, you don’t want to be left behind. The quick update files of today would have taken days to download 15 years ago.

You do not need to settle for a slow connection. You do not need to be left behind. Performing a test can help you see if you are above or below bar when it comes to your connection. This is where the speed test site comes in, which does exactly as you might expect. It performs a test to see what your downloads and upload speeds are, so you can use this info as needed.

Below, you will find some information on how to test your internet speed as well as our top picks for the fastest websites’ speed.

2. How You Should Test Your Internet CONNECTION Speed

You should not be splitting up your connection. Your connection shouldn’t be under heavy use when performing a test. This can apply to anything else in the household as well. This might cause interference in one way or another.

You should be testing under normal working conditions. What we mean by this is that you shouldn’t be deviating from the norm in terms of equipment or activities (downloading a movie in the next room, for example) when determining your internet speed. Unless you’re experimenting to see if a new setup provides a faster connection.

Perform a few tests. A single test shouldn’t take long, so we encourage you to perform a few tests to ensure accuracy.

Test over the course of the day. Your current ISP might work great now, but it might very well throttle your connection during peak hours of the day. Counter-act this potential blind spot by:

• testing over the course of the day a few times
• seeing how the results stack up.

3. What You Should Look for in a Testing Site

Ease-of-Use. You don’t want to spend 15 minutes learning how to test your internet speed.

Accuracy. If a site isn’t accurate, there’s no point in using it.

Commitment to real-world testing conditions. The better a site can accurately simulate common situations (such as streaming or downloading a movie), the more useful the site is. Testing under optimised conditions can be helpful for some people. However, most users will want a site that’s true to life.

A Simple Design. A complicated design with any additional tools or ads running in the background can affect your results, especially if your connection is slow. You want to work with a site that is simple and focused.

A Wide Server Range. If a site only has servers in one region, the results will be skewed by region. Choose a site that has servers across the country to provide you with an accurate reading.

Freedom from Bias. This doesn’t mean a company can’t create a test (someone has to make them), but interference is naturally unacceptable to any test. As such, we wanted to make sure that any selection of ours had no noticeable bias.

4. Our Top List of The 7 Best Internet Speed Test Sites

a) Speedtest.Net

We find Speedtest.net (owned by Ookla), one of the most popular and one of the oldest. It is still a fantastic option for people looking to test their connection, regardless of the platform they’re on.

The service has a massive list of servers based throughout the country. This allows you to perform more accurate tests, regardless of the distance you are looking for. It will also recommend the closest ones to you when you switch, making the user experience just a bit easier.

We were impressed in particular with the:

• the ability for users to keep records and previous data for comparison
• use a database to learn about stats regarding connections from across the world.

This makes it a great option for professionals or home users looking to notice trends and patterns. The results are also easily sharable if that is an important factor for you.

We are a bit concerned, however, with some of the ads that show up on the site and some of the graphics. They might interfere with getting a precise result, especially for users with an extremely slow connection to start with.

b) Speedof.me

At first glance, Speedof.me does not look like other internet speed test sites, which we find to be a good thing. The test displays itself in a chart over time. This allows you to see not only your total speeds but also the consistency of your connection. This makes it a great choice for online gaming.

That being said, the downside to this is, that it’s a bit harder to immediately see and interpret your results than other speed testing apps and sites. We noticed that the mobile version was very different in this regard, with more immediately accessible information.

But, it works on most devices without the need for an app (making it great for a quick check). It utilises HTML5 to perform the test, a standout feature when compared to many other test sites.

There aren’t as many servers when compared to some other sites on this list, and you can’t keep a record (which would be excellent considering how they display information). Though, many users will find this to be their speed test of choice.

c) TestMy.net

Testmy.net is one of the most comprehensive options we found when reviewing internet speed testing sites. Unarguably, they have fine-tuned their processes to perfection. It is an independent, trustworthy provider, which runs on HTML5. It does exactly what it was created to do without any unnecessary flair or distraction.

For people looking for a comparison, it provides statistics for your speed compared to the averages for your ISP, city, and more. It will tell you exactly where you stand. You won’t need to put in much extra effort to do so. Additionally, you can also create an account to:

• save records and check back to see if adjustments work
• check if the time of day matters for your connection.

The only downside is that much like Speedof.me, the results aren’t always pretty to look at (some would even say hard to read, but most certainly not hard to understand). Once you get used to it, you won’t mind! Still, it isn’t the fastest test to get a glance at what you’re working on within a given area. Professionals and enthusiasts certainly won’t mind in the long run, however.

d) Xfinity Speed Test

There isn’t much to complain about with Xfinity Speed Test. There are no distractions such as pop-ups or bits of unnecessary information littering the screen. The design is sleek and easy to read. It also has modern graphics in both the mobile and desktop versions of the programme. You’ll get quick download and upload speeds.

While it may be produced by Comcast, we didn’t detect any bias when using the tool. Besides, you don’t need to be a subscriber to use it. The readings were accurate and consistent.

There are also a few bonus features, such as being able to change the host location, if you know you’re working with something different on a normal basis. You can also change the protocol if needed. It provides a few tips if you want get accurate results. From all our estimations, it’s a great tool whether you’re looking to change your connection or want to optimise your current one.

It is missing a way to save tests. But for the average user, it’s one of our top choices.

e) Internet Health Test

Internet Health Test is a much more comprehensive test of all on this list. For anyone looking for as much information as possible from the multi-step testing process. Internet Health Test is your go-to option.

Indeed, it will effectively run your connection through an obstacle course of servers, situations, and locations, so that you get a set of data. It is much closer to real-world results than some other sites testing under ideal circumstances. Nonetheless, while it takes a bit more time than other sites to get results, you effectively get six tests at once.

Furthermore, it is also simplistic in design. It offers very few additional features. Besides, there aren’t too many settings you can change. That being noted, we find that it works best when paired with another service for comparison. It does, however, allow you to post your results on social media. You can also email them to yourself (or someone else) for future records. This might come in handy for IT professionals.

f) Speedsmart

The HTML5-based speed test Speedsmart is an easy-to-use and universally accessible option for you, which provides accurate speed test results (they send more data through to create a more fine-tuned test). It also provides you with ping information, which is great for anyone who needs a low-latency connection, like video chat and gamers.

Speedsmart, like a few others on this list, allows you to create an account and check on your previous tests, even across devices. This allows you not only to easily check a single device’s connection but also a network connection across a home or office.

It has a healthy, but not comprehensive, list of servers to choose from (with a listing of how far each is away from you, as a nice touch). It doesn’t try to do too much with its homepage, either. It’s a great all-around speed testing site for the average user, who might want ping information on top of upload and download speeds.

g) Fast.com

Even more simple than Xfinity’s option is Netflix’s Fast.com, which is the reason why people are using it for. Netflix consumes 15 % of the world’s bandwidth, so they have a good reason to provide people with a speed-testing app. They also have a vested interest in letting you know, when you’re ISP might be throttling your connection. Since they have had a long conflict with ISPs regarding this issue. Fast.com uses Netflix servers, making it perfect for making this determination.

When you start it up, there isn’t even a start button. You get a mostly white screen and some real-time results, before it settles on the ultimate estimation of your speed. You also get your upload speed at the end of the test. Yet, don’t let the first impression fool you, there are still plenty of options such as being able to select several parallel connections. Furthermore, it always shows all relevant metrics, which makes up for the poor initial startup design.

We wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for an overall speed test, but for Netflix? It’s exactly what you’re looking for.

Additional Notes

By no means is this list exhaustive? There are dozens if not more other sites that you can use in order to test your internet speed. Most of them will work just fine.

Yet after testing, we found that our above selections struck the right balance in terms of:

• ease-of-use
• accuracy
• design clarity
• freedom from bias.

We would also like to note that our top pick might not be the top pick for your needs. Perhaps you need extremely rigorous testing with more detail for professional IT reasons. In that case, the more minimalist options might not cut it for you. Consider your needs and make your choice from there.

5. What Can Cause Slow Speeds?

Once you test your connection, you might find that you aren’t getting the speeds you are looking for. After double-checking and re-running your tests, you will want to investigate further. One or more of the following reasons might be the culprit:

• Too much usage of the network at once.
• An outage in the area caused by maintenance or inclement weather.
• The router or cable is malfunctioning or overheating.
• Your WiFi signal is partially blocked.
• The ISP is throttling your connection.

• Your computer might be infected by malware or viruses.

5. What to Do Next?

That depends entirely on what the source of the problem is. Sometimes new hardware is the answer. Sometimes, you just need to change the location of the router. A clean-up of your system might help as well. If it’s the ISP’s fault, then you will need to contact them. If this gets you nowhere, you will need to change providers. This can unfortunately be tiresome without the right resources.

Conclusion

You need to know if you are getting what you paid for when it comes to your internet connection. We do hope that the above 7 sites will help you get a handle on what you’re looking for. You may need to try a few options and you will want to control your environment as best as you can. But, we promise the information is worth it when making decisions for your office or household.

We expect to update this list in the future, should there be:

• better options
• unavailability of one or all the above sites.

Finally, we hope that the above information provides you with any information you may require.

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Harness the Power of Marketing Campaign Orchestration

This presentation is from Timo Kohlberg and Doan Than. You will learn here how to harness the power of marketing campaign orchestration by:

• creating orchestrated experiences with great content
• driving hyper-personalisation across touchpoints
• leveraging real-time insights along the entire customer journey.

Hi, my name is Timo Kohlberg. I would like to get you thinking about your favourite coffee shop brand. Why do you go there? Is it about the product itself?

Well, of course, the product needs to be good. But it’s really more about other factors like the atmosphere in the coffee shop. How do I pay? How to order? For example, here in the USA at Starbucks, you can order your coffee and pay right away with an app. Then you can pick it up without waiting in line. Today, it’s more about the experience than the product.

We, at Adobe, identified 5 key pillars for customer experiences.

Content Velocity: Content creation is crucial in a world of so many devices and channels.

There is actually the role of Adobe campaign within Adobe Experience Cloud, being the orchestration engine sitting right in the middle.

Adobe Experience Platform lets you handle about everything from:

• advertising
• customer acquisition
• converting customers into turning them into context on your website with analytics cloud
• to personalise each and every experience you have with them within the magento commerce cloud.

Again, Adobe sits right in the middle as an orchestration and personalisation engine.

3 key pillars to achieve cross-channel orchestration success

1. Orchestrated Experiences

First of all, experiences need to be consistent and optimised for each device and each channel. It’s not enough to deliver stand-out email or mobile experiences, while have other experiences falling short on other touchpoints and channels.

2. Hyper-Personalisation

Think about customer data on steroids. Obviously, brands and accounts need to add transactional data to that. Think about the buyer behaviour on your website and then integrate other data sources like a propensity score for example.

3. Real-Time Insights and Journeys

More and more real-time insights, journeys, and information identify where customers are in their journeys, powered by the context you can deliver.

1. Orchestrated experiences start with great content

Marketers should not only think in the context of beautiful images, and channel optimisation, but also about the content process.

I like to call it the content supply chain. From creating beautiful content to managing that content, optimising, and delivering that content.

a) Content is the fuel of orchestrated experiences

• Take a look at sourcing and creating the best possible content. You should obviously have beautiful brand content from your agencies or internal designers. However, think also about integrating music-generated content into your communications.
• Streamlining the content management process with digital assets management. Use a content creation platform, where you can manage, optimise and deliver that content through solutions like Adobe Target and Adobe Campaign.
• Optimisation here is crucial. So, optimise delivery for all the important channels for you and your customers. Everything that relates to digital like website, mobile apps and any other interactions you have with your customers. If you are a retailer, you have a point-of-sale or a commerce/webshop you want to integrate. Basically, everything really should go towards one-to-one interactions through personalisation of content across channels like email, mobile, offline, and even the Internet of Things.

I’m going to show you a quick example of how our customers transformed the way they deliver their content.

b) A Content Transformation from single interactions

So, here is an example of Virgin Holidays, a well-known UK travel company.

So, above you see how they communicated with customers before choosing Adobe and Adobe Campaign.

This is a representation of a journey from someone booking travel. You can see how the situation was before (from a booking, and a payment reminder to an online checking). All this information from a data perspective was stored in different solutions, siloed, and not really available to all of the marketers.

From a visual perspective, there were also different systems delivering those messages and emails.

So, what I want to show you now, is the situation of the first campaign they ran.

C) To beautiful and consistent conversations

So, they had a content transformation to beautiful and consistent conversations with their customers by personalising content. Sometimes it’s as easy as including a booking code in all this information to reduce calls to the call center, for example. Besides, it is something that affects the bottom line.

2. Hyper-Personalisation is powered by data

Now, it’s time to talk about the usage of that data, its relevancy through hyper-personalisation, together with the content we just talked about.

a) Hyper-personalisation with the integrated customer profile

Obviously, think about the data you have in-house over the course of an individual customer journey.

You can actually build that single accessible view by combining information from channel preferences with online and offline channels. Then, bring that into a consistent campaign history. We will actually see that in the live demo, how it looks.

Here is an example from one of our retail customers.

b) Integrated Customer Profile – DNA for Campaign Management

We have two main data dimensions:

• Enterprise data: it is still the predominant data source for most of our customers (80 %).
• Digital Interactions encounter 20 % of data coming from those digital interactions and campaign data.

Above, you see different metrics you can track and combine in the integrated customer profile.

It’s really much more than just standard demographic data. Try to use all the customer data in-house as well as captured data based on what you actually do and what they prefer.

c) When Data meets Content

Again, in this section, I want to show you two examples of our customers.

• Travelocity, US travel brand, part of Expedia – Hyper-personalisation at scale.

In this case, it means they use all the information they have to create and send their newsletter.

For example, at the top, you see the mobile information they have on someone. If they know that a segment or a specific contact in their database hasn’t yet downloaded the app, they would push automatically that as the first content in the email.

Travelocity sends billions of emails to its customers. So, it’s very clear they couldn’t handle that manually anymore. They need a solution like Adobe Campaign, which can automate that personalisation process.

d) User Preferences and Customer Feedback

Secondly, in terms of data acquisition, the third dimension underestimated by many brands is ‘preferences’ from your customers.

So, in this instance, Travelocity has what they call a ‘travel profile’. In the preferences’ section, customers can choose what kind of deals they want to receive.

Based on this information, all the personalisation done through email and website is tailored to the needs and preferences of their customers.

3. Real-Time Insights and Journeys are driven by Content and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

For the last section, it’s crucial to integrate real-time information (behaviour). Marketers must know as well the context of where the customers actually are in terms of their buying journey phase. More and more of that is powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI).

So, again, 3 other examples to provide you with.

a) Connecting email to web

What you see above is a contextualised content and offers based on the search history of someone on the website.

So, someone just searched for holidays in the Bahamas. On the next day, they would receive a tailored deal based on their search history and how they interacted on the website. If they don’t want to book right away, they had the option to save it to their deal allows them to get more information about the destination and offers in the future.

On average, they have a much higher open rate and click-through rate.

b) Content needs to BE contextual and orchestrated

The second example from one of our travel brands in Europe is Heathrow airport.

On the left-hand side, you see how they use and contextualise all the information from the integrated profile.

I am just highlighting 3 things here:

• Product based on previous transactions:

You see at the top, it’s actually offers pushed based on previous transactions. In this case, someone has already parked at Heathrow airport; Consequently, they can actually push an offer for parking for the next flight.

• Exclude known users:

It’s important to incorporate mobile information not just in a mobile message, but also in other channels like email. So, exclude known users from offers, like downloading the app.

• Tailored brands/offers to segment:

If you are at the airport, they want to drive you to specific shops and brands. They are the right ones for the specific segment.

Think about going into the terminal area for the security check at the airport. If you have downloaded the app ‘Heathrow airport’, you may receive personalised push notifications for discounts or loyalty points in restaurants.

It’s working really well and they can tailor those messages and offers based on where you are in a specific terminal. But they also use more and more beacon technology to send you messages when you walk by a restaurant. This is a great example of orchestrated experiences with digital as well as also at the physical location (airport).

c) Email experiences powered by AI/ML

As a last example for this section, I want to show you an example of Adobe Sensei, our AI machine learning framework.

We have a feature here called ‘predictive subject line optimisation’, where you can test your subject line before you send out your newsletter.

So, think about the case you have to send out a newsletter on Thursday and do not have time to do an A/B test for your subject line. With this feature, you will be able to test your subject line based on the previous sent-out. It will actually predict open rates for that subject line. It will give you the feeling of whether it’s too long or too short and also find some optimisation with different categories.

d) An orchestrated Omni-Channel Experience

To sum up, the integrated customer profile consists of enterprise data, but also more and more digital interactions.

Then, bring that together with Content through the Content Supply Chain, to manage and deliver across different optimised channels.

Through this representation of a customer journey across many channels, we can learn more about the customer based on the data. So, you might start with the channel that activates customers to download the app, by sending a push notification.

In some instances, you might want to:

• send a direct mail or a catalogue
• integrate the call center into the website
• send a re-marketing email like we’ve seen with Velocity.

This strategy is focused on all relevant and meaningful experiences.

Perfect, so, I want to hand it over to Doan to take a live look at a demo of Adobe Campaign.

4. Adobe Campaign Live

Let’s start the demonstration by having a look at the data powering the Adobe Campaign Platform that is giving you an internal 360° view of the customer.

Here, we can view a profile I kept within the Adobe Campaign.

Adobe Campaign has an internally customisable relational database, which can be extended and modified for your specific business needs. We’ll have a look at what a profile looks like in Adobe Campaigns.

Above it is Kevin Blake and we can store all marketing data related to Kevin such as:

• name
• location
• aggregate scoring inside the platform, which can be used to trigger and power message sets from Adobe Campaign.

Please note that no two databases inside Adobe Campaign are the same. They are tailored and customised towards your business requirements.

On the top, we have all relevant business tabs related to Kevin as well as tracking logs.

These tracking logs:

• keep track of all messages you send out
• show you how customers interact with them.

On ‘orders’ tab, you can keep track of orders that came in:

Data can be used to trigger personal communications as required by your business.

This is not only linked to orders, this could be ‘mortgages’. Just depends on what your business needs are in terms of campaign management.

If we move to the workflow end, we’ll have a look at Adobe Campaign powerful and customisable workflow engine.

So, here on your right (see the below screenshot), we have a canvas, where you can drag and drop different parts of your customer journey.

This customer journey can be digitalised on this canvas. You can see where your customers are in each step of the customer journey that they are on with your brand.

On the left (see the below screenshot), we have ‘Union’, which we can drag and drop on the canvas to query for and deliver many channel messages to your contacts.

One particular note, we have many channels, which you can set up with Adobe Campaign, it’s not just emailed.

You can set up (as shown below):

• push notifications
• direct mail
• in-app messages
• SMS.

This will allow your users to create a schedule in multiple different ways. You can send it through multiple mediums. It will be based on your customer journey phase, their experiences, and preferences.

You can also do some basic data management notes (see below), where you can:

• enrich customer journey
• update data or save data into different tables or platforms.

All these below notes combined to create a rich contextual customer experience for your contacts, as they go on your brand journey.

Let’s have a look at how we can create a relevant and personalised email within Adobe Campaign.

So, inside the Adobe Campaign, there is an in-built drag-and-drop HTML render. This allows you to easily and seamlessly create professional and customisable emails, that can be delivered under the build I showed you earlier.

The fragments can be dragged on the email canvas, adaptable without a single amount of code.

Adobe Campaign comes from Adobe Sensei, which is an AI machine-learning engine. It enables to use of Adobe Sensei to make better sense of the data and create predictive sales analytics.

So, here we have a subject line optimisation:

We can see below how customers in the past have interacted with email. We also receive different suggestions on how to make this subject line better. Adobe Campaign Sensei will give you a better view of how these emails might perform in terms of ‘opened’.

So, Adobe Campaign is not just about creating a workflow and laying a run-out. It runs a report and continues to be innovative in these features.

With Adobe Campaign, it’s easy, flexible, and customisable with data points collected in real time. The preview report will show you the value of quickly getting a sense of different views. This allows you to get a better understanding of your marketing performance. Furthermore, it gives you a better idea of how attractive you are as a business.

Metrics such as ‘dimensions’ can be dragged and dropped to points. Points are accessible, interactive and all interconnected to devices.

Visualisation is simple, responsive, and re-sizeable.

With Adobe Campaign, you can set dates and apply different metrics depending on these dates.

These reports will automatically update to see what you are doing and tracking the past 6 days. On the left (below screenshot), you can drag different devices and see how your email campaign is doing in this regard.

Finally, we want to make sure that our customers actually make the most of their investments with the Adobe Experience Cloud, called ‘Experience League’.

At last, we also recommend you these two free whitepapers downloadable from our site:

• Mobile for the win
• Get out of your email marketing rut.

Digital Trends 2019 – Data is key to creating greater customer experiences

This presentation from Sean Donnelly and Jamie Brighton will focus on the most significant digital trends in 2019 that are driving marketing and customer experience strategy.

Hi, my name is Sean Donnelly. I’m a consultant and senior analyst at e-consultancy, where independent providers of research train in best practices. I am here to introduce you to a topic that is on the minds of all marketers.

Presently, I am going to talk to you about technology and marketing trends.

We have been working very closely with Adobe to reach out to the marketing community, in order to:

• ask them what kind of things they identify as opportunities,
• what they see as challenges and so on.

This gives us a very unique perspective to identify the operational reality in terms of marketers’ findings.

So, we have done a survey of 12 500 marketers, techies, and so on. It’s actually the largest global survey of its kind. We also accompany that with a series of qualitative interviews to draw additional insights.

Agenda:

• State of customer experience strategy

• Importance of customer data

• Control of customer data: compliance and walled gardens

• State of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

PRESENTATION N°1: Sean Donnelly

Just for clarification, we will define customer experience as being the sum of all the interactions a customer has with a brand, and their emotional reactions to those interactions.

1. The accelerated loyalty journey

Importantly, first-class personalised customer experience is really important for sustainability.

So, marketers might remember the 4 ‘P’s: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. But this old model changed. Somewhere along the lines, marketing became very much just about promotion. Promotion isn’t good enough. We need to think about the wider customer experience journey across Google, Social Media…

Clearly, this really expands the role of marketing beyond driving intention to purchase. If you can get a customer to advocate for your brand online, you may be able to deliver him to this loyalty loop for ongoing relations with you.

Now, customer service is increasingly focused and accompanied by technology and data.

Therefore, evaluate if your marketing technology infrastructure is fit for purpose. The technology platform is viewed as the engine room that drives customer experiences and marketing activities. Whereas, the data is the oil that lubricates and empowers this increasingly sophisticated machinery.

2. Data is the new everything

Likewise, a big part of marketing is the ability to understand and utilise data. As such, data skills are becoming increasingly integral. Marketing continues to transition from being an analogue activity to a digital activity with real-time data analysis.

a) Data and measurement

We can see that data serves 3 primary functions:

• Customer insight
• Tactic evaluation
• Demonstrate the value of marketing activities.

We have asked marketers to draw out what they are interested in and what they see as important.

b) The most exciting opportunities in 2019

• Data-driven marketing that focuses on the individual
• Optimising the customer experience
• Creating compelling content for digital experiences.

3. Customer journey management holds the key to personalisation

a) Top digital priorities in 2019

There are 4 top priorities which are as follow:

• Customer Journey Management: a key requirement for data-informed customer experiences
• Targeting and Personalisation: right message, right place, right time
• Content Marketing: continuing importance of creativity and design
• Customer Data Management (CMS): convert data into knowledge.

Now, achieving all this requires a highly integrated technology stack. So, the key is to have a more unified approach to marketing channels.

Example: Unilever increases investment in marketers as it shifts from ‘big ad campaigns’ to smaller real-time campaigns. This results in the:

• creation of digital hubs in about 20 countries.
• recruitment of marketers with data capabilities
• investment in cloud-based tools, in order to be able to centralise and surface data from more than 150 different data points.

3. DATA COMPLIANCE AND WALLED GARDENS

As you can imagine, data management and data control are becoming more and more intertwined. So, here are some factors to consider:

• Security: marketers and developers need to be responsible for the users’ data security
• Privacy: GDPR is the beginning of an era where marketers need to be very careful about how they use customer data
• Integration: continued efforts to centralise online and offline touchpoints (by marrying transactional data, sentiment data, social media data)
• Machine Learning: turning data into insights (google analytics) and personalising customer experience.

Please let me provide you with a few examples:

Lloyds bank identified GDPR as an opportunity to educate its email subscribers about the parameters and requirements around GDPR. They did this through an email campaign and helpful pages using laymen’s language under their website. Following this re-direct of emails (bank statements and so on), customers have been very appreciative of this action. This is a kind of boost of customer trust and loyalty.

L’Occitane did research into the abandoned shopping cart on their site. Essentially, they fired up a layer onto the screen. This led to an increase of 2.65 % of the conversion rate per visitor. It had a major impact on the bottom line.

4. Top marketing challenges

Yet, what are the top marketing challenges organisations face?

Here are the main identified challenges:

• Lack of internal resources
• Inconsistent experiences throughout the customer lifecycle
• Difficulty in tracking marketing effectiveness and media/ad spend
• Difficulty getting a holistic view of customers across all interactions.

Ultimately, marketers need to think about the flow of information through the entire partner ecosystem.

Withal, interviewees for this report identified issues with walled gardens, principally Facebook and Google. Marketers must determine whether the long-term commercial objectives are best served by operating in these closed platforms. Inarguably, these platforms offer only a bridged insight into customer data. This theme brought increased attention to data retention of sharing practices of Facebook and Google.

5. Increased uptake of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

We can review on a broad spectrum and split it into two classifications:

• Human-styled artificial intelligence
• Task-oriented artificial intelligence.

How is the Artificial Intelligence (AI) being applied?

It’s been mostly used to analyse data. That’s because humans can’t analyse large amounts of data. Inasmuch as AI can mine huge amount of structured and unstructured data generated by campaigns and user interactions. This freezes up time for marketers to deliver higher value tasks.

In terms of analysing data, AI and marketing can be used to:

• create unique customer profiles (personalisation)
• provide relevant experiences such as delivering dynamic website content, based on personal behavioural data
• generate content well to increase engagement rates
• optimise intelligent digital advertising, based on buying history and interactions.

In summary, I would like to leave a few with the following recommendations:

• Educate your organisation about the potential of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning
• Strive for integrated customer experience, marketing technology and advertising technology
• Activate customer data on prescriptive and predictive meaningful analytics insights. This requires the right tools to compile first, second and third-party data, in order to enable that timely and personalised interactions. This can also improve attribution capabilities as well as leading to a better optimisation of the media mix.
• Cherish your data as a marketing asset to the wider business. Be wary of walled gardens. By combining data from various touchpoints, you can create that personalised experience and a ‘single customer view’. Data must be fully harnessed and companies need to be able to access it without restrictions.
• Keep pushing the customer-first agenda within your organization. It might also mean educating your customer facing colleagues about their own value proposition. You need to help them understand their role in the customer experience strategy, by empowering them to make decisions.

And now, I’m handing back over to Jamie Brighton.

PRESENTATION N°2: JAMIE BRIGHTON

At this point, we’d like to think what you can take advantage of in the digital trends. Now, I highlighted at the start of the presentation that we’ve seen things like Social Media Management, Video Advertising coming up as focuses.

1. Platform for Personalisation

a) 3 areas of focus for 2019

Needless to say, Personalisation has come out as a key area of digital focus for marketers over the last 9 years of consultancy research.

However, I think it’s probably no surprise to see that Personalisation is again part of 2019’s priorities.  ‘Digital Transformation’, ‘Personalisation’ and ‘Having the right platform in place’ are key areas I’d like to concentrate on.

Let me give you an example. Harvard Business Review shows us that people organisations focusing on Personalisation have successfully:

• reduced costs by 50%
• increased revenues by up to 15%
• improved their marketing capabilities overall within the business.

Often, marketers don’t know where to start due to lack of knowledge. Unfortunately, this is holding organisations back.

However, Personalisation really needs to start with people and process and technology. I’m stating the obvious but it’s really important to remember.

We, at Adobe, believe that there are 3 fundamental pillars to getting ‘Personalisation’ right.

b) 3 Key building blocks to success

• Data and Audiences: you need a data platform to understand who your customers are. Then, you need to segment those audiences and communicate with them via your Personalisation strategy.
• Content: Once you understand your audience, you obviously need to communicate with them and give them the right content. So, having content and data together in the same platform becomes critical.
• Strategy: When you have those things together, you’ll need to know:
  • where to personalise
  • how to personalise
  • what’s the right time within the customer lifecycle to put a message in front of your customers or prospects.

So, I’d like to spend a bit of time thinking about these key requirements.

2. Key requirements

a) Content Foundation

Any platforms that you invest in should enable you and your teams to offer content in an intuitive way. The interface/environment should make sense to them to use and re-use core components out of the box (your sites, your apps, your general interfaces).

This means you can get time to add value, instead of investing in re-building, or re-inventing the wheel. Also, content you produce in your team’s build must not be locked up in the Content Management System (CMS) or HTML system (that can only be rendered in a web page).

We need to be able to:

• syndicate content, whether it’s to affiliates’ social sites
• understand how that content is going to be displayed
• make sure it complies with all the guidelines for your brand
• get content out to whatever channel/device your customers use to engage with you.

b) Insights

Insight manifests itself in a number of ways. Fundamentally, we should be able to understand how that content is being consumed. This will allow people who are building that content, to have all the data they need. This will result in informed and intelligent decisions about the next iteration of that content or the next campaign that they want to set up.

Besides, this also means that they need to be able to visualise where customers/prospects are engaging with that content through things like Heatmaps, Clickactivity maps.

Moreover, if you have already the data in a platform like this, you should start leveraging Artificial Intelligence, in order to detect abnormalities in the data.

This means alerting you to how customer behaviour is changing, in order to present potential opportunities.

This might be:

• spiking customers’ visits
• dropping conversation rates.

Then, you can adjust in real-time the experience for your customers, to make sure you are not missing out.

c) Personalisation

So, it should be very straightforward for you to create a page and an element of content.

Yet, within a couple of clicks, test that content and work out whether it resonates better with different segments of your audience.

Or even, use AI through Adobe Sensei to target individual customers within your customer base with the most relevant experience within their customer journey.

3. Unlocking the value in data

a) Move faster and smarter with an integrated DMP and Analytics

Well, I’d like to get a little bit tactical here. Often, organisations want to marry together their analytics platform with their Data Management Platform (DMP).

b) How it works

This effectively means bringing together:

• the first-party data (your owned customers’ data)
• analytics tool
• with the second and third-party data (available from the Customer/Data Management System).

As a result, you can get a little grainier about the reports/segmentation you are running on your customers.

c) Quantify value of 2nd and 3rd-party data insights

Next, let me give you a few examples on how it’s going to help you. Having these two platforms/pieces technology together means you can have a much better understanding about who your customers are and how they are behaving.

Increasingly, organisations invest in second-party data, where there is a trusted relationship between the two brands and an overlapping of their customer base. They share the customer profiles within their organisations. Thus, they can provide a better experience for the customer in the long run, through better targeting of content and advertising.

That also means a better understanding of how your campaigns are performing.

d) Calculate media campaign effectiveness

It also enables to think about how we can use information from on-site behaviour to be more targeted off-site. These first, second and third-party data enable the use of online customer data and information, to drive more advanced targeting of off-site advertising. By using that information and surfacing it in the DMP, we can make more informed decisions about what advertising to serve to customers or prospects, based on that site’s behaviour.

Another idea is to consolidate online and offline data.

e) Consolidate reporting across online and offline assets

Through analytics platforms, there is the ability to import purchase history and behaviour in physical points of retail, for example. By tying these together, we can understand the impact of digital behaviour, digital experience on the in-store or offline experience, and vice-versa.

I’ll just call out an example here. A travel company is able to:

• overlay destination preferences with purchase behaviour
• see which audiences have a high propensity to book with this particular travel organisation.

That can be used to re-target individuals off-site. It could be somebody who has abandoned half-way through the booking process. That information can be used to do a much more targeted serve. This will get them to come back later and complete that transaction on the site.

f) Audience Analytics: Real World Success

Consequently, organisations are starting to take advantage of this type of capability.

4. How we can win a digital transformation?

McKenzie’s research shows they are some challenges to getting digital transformation right.

The organisation fails when it is not making sure that organisational culture is actually on-board for the change they are trying to bring about.

a)The Adobe digital marketing capability maturity model

First and foremost, we, Adobe, believe that one of the best way to understand this, are to:

• benchmark your own organisation and its competition
• understand where you fit within a maturity scale.

b) Prioritise areas of improvement with your stakeholders

Indeed, Adobe can help you focus on recommended actions for each pillar and dimension via a workshop with an Adobe representative.

Any output of the process is a very detailed report, which shows you:

• your current score for each of those 7 dimensions
• any gaps between where you are and where you would like to be.
• a set of recommendations on how to bridge that gap
• where you can have the biggest impact with the most effective spend.

c) Re-evaluate priorities based on resources, complexity and reward size

Furthemore, you can also apply a standard cost/benefit analysis to understand where are the gaps compared with how the spend is going to be. This wil make a difference to your particular business.

Additionally, that helps with building a case within your organisation.

d) Build the case beyond Return On Investment (ROI) and cost-saving

So, to wrap up, a maturity assessment will give you an understanding of where your strengths and weaknesses are. They identify as well the key opportunities you can embrace when it comes to people processing technology.

Skyrocket your reputation and attract new clients by becoming your own publicist

How to rapidly grow your email list, credibility and visibility without paid advertising or expert credentials.

1. What you’ll discover:

• • Why  guest posting to media is a must for you NOW (even if you don’t feel ready)

• • Everything you need and don’t need to rock your business and life with guest posting on your side!

• • How to nail it despite your already packed schedule

• How to level up fast by just being yourself, right now!

If you want to attract quality clients and grow your email list like crazy, you want to stand out from the noise! Make a big impact with your gifts and be discovered for your unique, personal magic…

Guest posting is the most low-risk, high converting way to, grow your email list, authority and business FAST…

2. About Susie Moore

First of all, Susie is from the UK, lived in Australia and now living in the USA.

She used to work as a business developer and started working as a coach on a side-business.

Also, she would be reading lots of great content from blogs and websites. She was worried about how people would found out about her beyond the family and friends’ circles. A website she was paying most attention to was MindBodyGreen

As a life coach, she started becoming more aware of other coaches. She read a lot about coaching on that website and started submitting her first article to Mind Body Green. That became her very first guest post. She received nearly 4000 shares on her very first piece and got a massive reach with this guest posting tool. She became hooked.

3. How does guest posting work?

Basically, you submit your piece of content normally between around 600 and 700 words to a media outlet that speaks to you, that has your ideal avatar/audience reading it.

Additionally, at the end of your guest post, you have your call-to-action, meaning you are asking your readers to click to something. That can be your blog, your website, your landing page, your books.

As a result of your call-to-action, you will get all sorts of benefits such as increase of subscribers, one-on-one clients, social media followers, webinar sign-ups, sales’ page visitors, book sales, programmes and so much more. In fact, all Susie’s one-on-one clients come through referrals via her online contact form after seeing her in the media.

Using this guest posting method, she grew her email list by 29000+ subscribers in just 9 months for FREE (sometimes she was getting paid to contribute) and landed coaching clients at $1500 + per hour (with a waiting list).

4. Guest posting is the root of all the best publicity.

First and foremost, let me clarify what she means when she talks about media. Media includes online newspapers, magazines, radio, tv, facebook lives.

Secondly, there is another cool thing that happens once you start sharing your work and stories, influencers start to pick it up. They start sharing your stories because it’s out there and relevant as well as speak to their audience.

But, fear not if you have a different background and no connections, this works for every market and media. Even being from a foreign country can be a real advantage to you.

5. So why should you be doing this?

Well, you get the edge because people know about you.

Indeed, it’s pure and simple: discovery, i.e, get more clients buying your products or services.

Of course, you get more credibility and authority from getting your name appearing in big media outlets.

As a consequence, you can increase your rates just as a matter of getting media.

Besides, more opportunities open up to you such as speaking gigs, bookings.

You also get an expert status and make a bigger impact. If you have something of value and use to people. It also works forever, since your articles live forever. People can discover you at any time or day.

Since she has had regular students and clients, she has refined this highly teachable and repeated system for guest posting opportunities and hot leads on the regular…

6. So, tell me…

Have you ever guest posted? Are you happy with the results? If not, why?

Not all media is created equal.

• • ROADBLOCK #1: I don’t have time to invest in this!

• ROADBLOCK #2: I’m not an expert!

Think instead what you have to share and contribute to the world?

Here are a few topic ideas:

NB: Inside Secret!

Once you started creating content and getting featured for it, you get quickly known for your topic, because it’s the sharing that makes you an expert, not the other way around!

• ROADBLOCK #3: Isn’t it easier to run Facebook Ads?

Well, Facebook Ads cost a lot in the long run. Furthermore, with all of the advertising noise on Facebook and Instagram, standing out has become much harder.

Not to mention, you get more quality leads from guest posting than ads.

7. What you need is a process.

Indeed, this is all you need…

• The best kept secret content creators know
• How this stuff actually works
• How to make it happen as fast and easily as possible

Now, let’s dive in the best kept secret content creators know.

Write like you are talking to a friend by using your voice the way that you speak.

Use short sentences, dialogues and share a message.

Finally, she shared with us her 5 time-saving media secrets to increase your impact (and not your to-do list):

Part 1) Pitch your existing content (or pick your first area of focus, i.e topic). Eg blog, youtube video…

Part 2) Write for places that syndicate

For example, Susie has a column with a website Greatist. This website shares/syndicates content with others. She never wrote one blog posts for these websites like WebMD. This is what she calls writing one blog post and turning into twenty.

Part 3) Share guest posts on your website or blog.

Part 4) Repurpose and share your content again and again.

Part 5) Finally, rock those warm leads!

Business Tips on how to use Video and Networking

I listened to two business tips’ presentations at the Local Enterprise Dublin City Women in Business Network on:

• ‘How to use Video in Digital Marketing’ with Niamh Guckian from Go Motion Academy
• ‘How to network’ with Melissa Curley from Social Bee

FirSt OF ALL, Let me start with Niamh Guckian’s presentation about developing a video strategy that works.

1. Videos create engagement

When doing an email campaign, research shows that an email with a video has a 96% increase in Click-Through Rate. Furthermore, videos up to 2 minutes get the most engagement. Additionally, 92% of mobile video viewers share videos with others.

2. Other considerations to think about with video marketing

However, when you plan your video marketing campaign, you must remember to start in the funnel by following the customer journey. Next, you need to drill down with video content and think about which type of video content would suit your business most. Do not ever do videos for the sake of it!

3. The customer journey

Indeed, when doing video marketing, take into consideration the different stages of the customer journey:

• Awareness – your product/service is unknown to your targeted audience
• Consideration – your audience has found your product/service
• Conversion – your audience is ready to buy your product/service. It’s the sale stage
• Retention – your audience is ready/open to come back and buy your product/service again.

4. Who is your audience?

This is the key question you need to ask yourself.

• Where are your potential customers?

Insider Business Tips: Statistics show that 88% of Business-to-Business (B2B) videos are viewed on a desktop. Consider as well if Social Media would a good platform for your video. Note that YouTube is very competitive.

• What do they want?
• And you, what do you want from them?
• What are the others doing in the business?
• Do you need a disposable content (punctual events) or an evergreen content (tutorials/explainers)?
• Is your content relatable (not over-emotional)?
• What is the story (curve)?
• Is your content useful/educational?

5. Choose a video genre

Once you have identified your audience and what content to go for, choose a genre:

• Ask Me Anything – responding to questions, providing an engaging expertise
• Vlog
• Video tour
• Event highlights
• Review
• Tutorial
• Explainer
• Demo
• Interview
• Live Streaming

At the end of your video, remember to add a strong Call-to-Action by asking your audience to do something. Your call-to-action must be specific (not just ‘subscribe’) and get people talking/guessing.

6. Video genre and the customer journey

Incontestably, each video genre corresponds to a specific stage in the customer journey.

• Awareness stage: A video tour or a vlog
• Consideration stage: Ask Me Anything, demo or explainer video
• Conversion stage: Event highlights or tutorial video
• Retention stage: Review, interview or live streaming video.

7. Video marketing campaign CALENDAR

In that regard, you need to know if your video will be episodic (occasional events) or if you want to stay in your audience’s mind (evergreen content).

Consequently, if you want your audience to follow you through, you will need to create between 6 and 12 videos. In other terms, you must remain consistent in your posting and sharing of videos. If you are short with time, you can start your campaign by sharing one video a week.

8. Other BUSINESS tips

Finally, if you are going for an explainer video, you must ensure it is animated and engaging enough. Other genres can be used for a more personal and authentic delivery.

Budgetwise, if you want to hire an agency to do it for you on an episodic basis, forecast a budget between 800 and 2000 Euros for several videos.

Otherwise, you can make your own videos with the following sites:

• shortcut.com
• human5.com that turns text into videos.

Then, let’s move on to the second and last presentation of the evening by Melissa Curley about small talk for big gains.

1. Why is networking a key marketing tool for business growth and success?

Foremost, we need to be interested in and curious about one another.

Why? What matters about networking?

• The creation of Like/Trust/Respect
• The importance of conversation.

In other words, networking allows you to grow your social capital before you ever need them. It’s like a social currency. To be good at it, try to have fun at it!

2. What is a conversation about?

Most importantly, a conversation is a two-way listening and talking. Therefore, you need to focus on listening to understand, not just on saying something. So, to be a good networker, you need to understand emotions and feelings about words.

3. Tips to improve your listening

Undeniably, listening means:

• Receiving
• Appreciating
• Summarising
• Asking.

4. Preparation for a networking event

Still, if you are introvert and uncomfortable with networking, don’t worry.  Remember this!  Extroverts don’t always make the best networkers, as they aren’t always good at listening and connecting with the others.

Business Tips: before you go to a networking event, ask for the attendees’ list. This way, you can organise, who you want to connect with. This will make you more focused and efficient.

5. 10 pointers to a better conversation

Now, let me share with you a few tips on how to be a better conversationalist.

• Be present
• Enter every conversation assuming you have something to learn
• Ask open-ended questions
• Go with the flow
• Have courage
• Avoid engaging in conversational narcissism
• Refrain from repeating yourself
• Don’t get tangled up in small details
• Listen
• Be succinct.

6. Networking budget

On the other hand, 50 -60% of your budget should go into your networking. Likewise, concentrate on building mutually beneficial relationships.

7. What networking is and isn’t

Thus, it’s good to be aware of behaviours to avoid or adopt when networking.

AS A MATTER OF FACT, Networking isn’t:

• Salesy/Pushy
• Fake/Insincere
• About shameless self-promotion
• Only extroverts are good at it.

CONTRARILY, Networking is ABOUT:

• Making connections
• Gaining knowledge
• Adding value before you extract it.

8. How to create an effective network

IN summary, follow these last business tips:

• Do research about people’s businesses and follow-up
• Keep in touch, nurture contacts through social media and face-to-face meetings.

All in all, did you find this blog post helpful? Do you have further business tips or tricks to share?

 

 

What is a content upgrade and how can it impact your conversion rates?

What is a content upgrade and why does it help you increase your conversion rates more than a lead magnet? Kevin McGrath from Beacon will explain you this and how you can create it with Beacon tips and tricks.

But before delving into the topic, let me start introducing you, Kevin McGrath.

About Kevin McGrath

Kevin is from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of Beacon, a plugin that can be used with WordPress to help you generate more leads.

He has a background in Design and initially ran a web design agency called Starfish for about 6 years. But he is now more focused on Marketing and Growth.

Through his webinar, he talks about:

• Lead Generation
• Landing Page
• Lead Magnet
• Content Upgrade
• Time-Saving Tips and Tricks with Beacon
• Exclusive Bonuses from Beacon

Lead Generation

• Every marketer looks for more leads to gain more clients. However, most people don’t buy on their first interaction.

Indeed, people like to do research before they make a purchase (web price comparisons, shipping rates..). If people spend a big budget, they will want to make sure they get it right. When you do your research, you want to find out things like: How does this company work like another business like mine? Can this company offer a solution to the problem that I’m facing?

• As marketers, we want to help you with your research and also available and stay in touch with you through the course of that research.

We want leads and email addresses from people who are likely to buy from us in the future.

• Better Leads.

Avoid having an email list of poor leads not interested in your products. This will be a waste of your time to target these people.

So, in order to get email addresses, marketers have been doing this for decades. If you give somebody something of value in exchange for their email address, they are more likely to give it to you. We can give something like an eBook in exchange for an email address.

Generally, when people offer eBooks, they do so on a dedicated landing page to offer the prospect a lead magnet. A lead magnet is essentially a downloadable piece of content like an eBook, or a whitepaper or something that is basically information-based that you are giving your prospects to help nurture to become your customer.

Now, there are two points in this strategy:

1. Landing Page

2. Lead Magnet.

The Problem with lead magnet strategy

The strategy is flawed. Basically, if you are putting a lead magnet up on a landing page, you are going to have to spend a lot of time preparing the content for that lead magnet.

• Large lead magnet.

The lead magnet will have to be impressive and well package (100 pages long).

• Another page to drive traffic to.

That’s a new page in your website. You are not having the benefit of, say, a blog post, that is already gaining lots of organic traffic. You are going to have to come up with a new traffic acquisition strategy, in order to drive customers to the page.

• Visitors need to be ‘warmed up’.

Once your visitors get to the page, you are going to have to warm them up to get them to download an eBook and see its benefits. You are essentially starting from scratch.

• Trying to appeal to everyone is another issue with this lead magnet strategy.

I’m sure, guys, to have familiar with various customers’ personas, various stages in the buying cycle. Say, you have 2 or 3 personas with their individual needs and problems that they want to resolve, each may be at a different stage of the buying cycle. Some may not know you at all and others may know you well and just need a gentle reminder note.

• eBooks aren’t anymore the new kids on the block.

They have been around for a while and as marketers tend to overdo these strategies with this as soon as we see some success with that. People have become jaded with the overall eBook strategy and do not take the time reading a lengthy book.

But don’t worry, there is a solution to that.

the SOLUTION WITH content upgrade system strategy

A content upgrade is a targeted resource for individual blog posts.

So, instead of having a dedicated landing page for a big eBook type of resource, it’s just a bonus offered as part of a blog post. You will place this free bonus just after the introduction of the blog post in a centred embedded box for better results. If you click on the box, you will get a pop-up asking for your details. It will bring you to a checklist or short 1-3 pages long content.

• So, a content upgrade is a short actionable download like a checklist or resource guide.
• It will build on the subject of the blog post.

So, the blog post is the theory and the free bonus is the practical application of that theory. So, you are educating people with the blog post. They are already interested in and read it and you are helping them to implement the advice in the blog post with your download.

• It’s just a simple strategy and that’s why it’s so effective. You basically capitalise on that existing blog traffic.
• It is also very targeted as related to a blog post for a specific persona at a specific stage in the buying cycle.

After anyone downloaded that targeted content, you can segment them as, for example, ‘a copyrighter who is interested in SEO’ if that’s the blog topic.

• When you have that extra information, you are more likely to sell and market to them more appropriately in the future.

So, they are more likely to purchase his premium products from him.

• But most importantly, this content upgrade system strategy results in high conversion rates.

Your conversion rate is essentially the percentage of people that come to your blog post and give you their email address. For eg, if you have 100 people visiting your page and 10 people downloading your content, you have a conversion rate of 10 %, The higher conversion rate is, the more efficiently you are using your traffic. It means the fewer resources, i.e time and money, you will have to spend driving traffic to your blog posts. So optimising for conversion rates is important. You can generate between 5 and 16 times more leads for your business. It’s a life-long evergreen strategy.

So, why is it working? You are offering something is short.

• It’s a short article. Most people are more likely to download something short as they have a short attention span.
• It’s useful. It is directly related to the blog post to help implement tactical and practical advice. It helps reader getting closer to the goals they want to achieve.
• Because this is part of a blog post, readers are already engaged. The next part is to convince them that you can help them further by doing the content upgrade. People are more likely to opt-in when they are already engaged.

People tend to ignore pop-ups when they scroll down the page. So, if you can include your call-to-action within the main flow of the blog post, you will see better results. I would say to use the in-line forms.

Actually, LeadPages did some research into the number of clicks required to opt-in. They said that the two-staged call-to-action is more effective/ than the single stage one and perform better in terms of conversions. So, if you show an email box with an input form straightaway, people will try to avoid it.

So, before we move on, I’d like to recap.

What is the difference between a content upgrade and a lead magnet?

Content Upgrade	Lead Magnet
Embedded within a blog post Builds on the content of a blog post Is short Is actionable Uses existing traffic Prospect is nurtured by the blog post (more qualified traffic) Has high conversion rates	Has a dedicated landing page Lies on a standalone content Is long Is educational Has new traffic required Prospect needs to be convinced by the landing page Has lower conversion rates

Content upgrades should be part of your blogging routine and go along with it.

So, your blogging strategy probably looks like this:

What I’m proposing is that you add an extra step to that process:

I want to show you how you can create these content upgrades.

Beacon can help to speed up the content upgrade strategy for you. I want to show you time-saving tips to implement these content upgrades into your blog posts quickly.

Beacon Time-Saving Tips and Tricks

• Set up brand colours. This is quickest overly most overlooked feature within Beacon.
• Create a re-usable content library, so that you can drop in any pieces of content into any content upgrades you create in the future.
• Create a re-usable template so that you can create your branding and keep re-using it, instead of having to work from scratch every time.

So, in Beacon’s normal interface, I create a workbook with one of our standard templates. The template contains a cover page, a short introduction, a worksheet with some questions to answer. This kind of school-like exercise helps people think about strategic things by working through the process on their own. The content upgrade finishes with a call-to-action.

• If you choose that template, go through each page to see what you can customise for your business. First thing, you are going to have to change that logo. You will need to pick your brand colour on all pages to get the colour scheme in line with my brand. I would advise a more sullen kind of colour but there is no colour to avoid.

Obviously, that’s not ideal. So I want to show you this trick. It is buried a little bit under the document settings (4^th icon down the left-hand side). Once you click on it, it will open this ‘default styles’ panel. You will notice that the colour template is set up for you. This means that if you set up your template colours, this will be updated throughout the document.

• What you are going to find in content upgrades is that you may be re-using certain types of content in every single content upgrade that you make.

One example of that would be an ‘about the author’ page to give readers context about who prepared the content upgrade. Why should they trust you? The purpose is to nurture prospects into qualified leads.

Let’s create an ‘about the author page’. Underneath the first ‘pages’ tab, I’m going to click on the ‘Add New Page’ button. I’ll look for a text focused page template. I’ll filter that. I’m going to choose the two columns layout. I’ll include an image. It’s always good to add an image of the author. I’ll also add some information from social media in a headline box/card at the bottom.

Every time I make a content upgrade, I don’t want to go through all those steps each time. Instead, I’m going to go to ‘Pages’ tab, then click on the 3^rd button down ‘Page settings’. Then I’ll click on the ‘Convert’ button under ‘Convert this page into a template’. I’ll save that template and refresh the page. So, next time you click on ‘Add New Page’, you will have your template saved if you scroll down the templates.

• How to convert an entire publication into a reusable template. I want to show you how to convert a document into a template.

Let’s create a re-usable template as a starting point. We are not going to have a worksheet in each template, so let’s delete that. You can your logo/image. You will be able in a week time to save image library as well.

To convert this into a reusable template, I’m going to click on ‘Document Settings’ tab on the left-hand side and click on the ‘Convert’ button. I’ll give this template a name and save it. Then I’ll leave the editor, go back to the ‘Dashboard’. When you go and click on the ‘Create New’ button, then ‘New Editor’. This will lead you to the ‘Pick your Magnet’ screen to choose a template. Let’s say we create a ‘Checklist’, select ‘No’ to import content. Then, on the next screen for ‘Choose a theme’, scroll down to the bottom and you’ll find your re-usable template. Then, you’ll click on ‘Add New Page’, filter for the checklist and add what you saved.

Note: Some of the features that I did show you are Premium Features. The part where I showed you the convert templates (page and document), you need a paid account to use that feature. However, the brands and colours are available for free. To justify going for a paid account, you will get exclusive bonuses.

EXCLUSIVE BONUSES

These will be available to you if you upgrade to a paid account after this webinar (Kevin will be notified once you do so). For that, just shoot an email to Kevin so that he can send them to you.

1. Lead Magnet Learning Pack is a swipe file of 13 content upgrades used on our blog to help Beacon grow to 25000 users. This is a good source of inspiration for a content upgrade to make. They are all different in design.
2. Expert Audio Interview with Laura Roader, founder of MeetEdgar. Laura has grown to 7 figures business. She developed a software product that uses content marketing, content upgrades and lead magnets to grow her business. I’ll be sharing with you some of the strategies she uses.
3. Free Beacon Template Design that I will personally design for to your business worth $1000. I’ll have a consultation with you to understand your needs (2-3 days work).

If you have any questions, drop an email to Kevin@beacon.by and he will be more than happy to follow-up with you individually.

To finish off with this talk, you want to watch its demo and presentation:

Finally, if you are interested in, you may explore these 30 Content Upgrade Ideas to Grow Your Email List (Updated).

How to Create a Stunning Short and Long Film with any Skills Levels

This is a guide for anyone who wants to improve their filmmaking skills regardless of their professions and levels.  You will not only learn how to create a stunning short or long film but also how to succeed in the filmmaking industry! 

This talk comes from a 1h webinar. I have transcribed its content in his own words.

The agenda points are as follow:

1. How do I get started?

2. Top 10 secrets to cinematic film shots

3. My 6 steps to making money.

About the presenter @parkerwalbeck

First of all, I am 28 years old based out of Salt Lake City, Utah and I spent about 3 years working with a YouTuber named Devin Super Tramp. I had the opportunity to travel all over the world creating content for top name brands.

Some of the brands I work for during those travels include Ford, Champion, CityBank, Mattel, Turkish Airlines, Ubisoft, and many more…

On these high budget projects, I worked as a cinematographer, editor and even director at times. So, if you take nothing from this training, at least take away the confidence of knowing that the things I’m teaching you today, if applied, will give you the know-how to produce high-end video content for big names companies like these.

More recently I branched off and started my own production company working with some big names like Sean Johnson, Tony Hawk, and I grew my own YouTube channel to over 200 000 subscribers in just the first year. Creating content on my own channel for some big brand names such as LG, Canon and receiving sponsorship from companies like Glidecam, Zhiyun and Wescott and many more.

In a nutshell, I have learnt what it takes to create high-quality videos in a tracked high paying clients. I am super excited to share with you my insights right now. So let’s dive in.

1- How did I get started?

Secondly, I’m going to share with you my story and steps I took to get where I am today without going to film school.

So let’s rewind. Five years ago, I was knocking doors, selling network tv in the hot weather of Texas. I was absolutely hating my job and dreading getting up every morning to get to work. But I needed the money to figure out what I really wanted to do for a career. One night, I came across a quote by Steve Jobs that completely inspired me and changed my life. It reads: ‘Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.’

So, I quit my job the next day, drove back to Utah and started searching for my real passion. That’s when I came across a video on Youtube by a guy named Devin Super Tramp and I immediately fell in love with his style. He had these perfectly smooth shots, vibrant colours and moving music. This is it, that’s exactly what I want to do with my life.

I used my life savings to buy my first camera to buy a used Canon T3i, a Tokina 11-16mm and Glidecam HD 2000, totally $1,300. You need to be willing to spend money in good professional gears if you want to be treated as a professional.

But as soon as my fancy new gears arrived, I realised I had no idea how to use it. So, I spent the summer watching frustrating Youtube tutorials trying to teach myself how to do everything. I’m sure a lot of you have been in the same scenario where you spend an hour looking for a tutorial. Finally finding one that looks promising but it’s 20 minutes long and you are lucky if you get 30 seconds of useful information out of it. Huge waste of time!

But after 3 or 4 months of tutorial watching and learning by trial and error, I took my limited knowledge down to Southern Utah University attending school at the time. That’s when I had my first opportunity to create a name for myself.

The first event of this school year was that awesome Pink Dancing. While dancing with my friends, I noticed that nobody was filming the event. I immediately recognised this opportunity to pose myself as a professional filmmaker on campus. I pretended to know what I was doing and like I was the one hired to film the event. And this is a huge principle to my success, be confident! Take the opportunities that present themselves to you. Because that’s the only way to grow and get better. I often refer to this principle as ‘Fake it until you make it’.

I then took that footage home, editing together a video, posted it on Youtube the next day. Everybody started sharing it like crazy. Everybody loved the video including the administration who saw the video and pulled me in the office. They said ‘we love this video you just made, we’d like to offer you a scholarship to film the rest of our events for the rest of the year’.

Within a couple of months, I was able to make a return on my initial investment by landing a full scholarship and paid gigs around campus. But I didn’t stop there. A huge part of my success was continually learning and growing. So, instead of being content with my new found success, I pushed myself to the next level by upgrading my camera set with a Canon 5D M3, Canon lenses of 16-35 mm and 70-200 mm and a Glidecam HD 2000, totalling of $6500.

This new set up was a huge key to being able to take my next opportunity. About a month after buying my new gear, I saw a Facebook post by Devin Super Tramp needing somebody for shootings. I replied to it. He responded back ‘Perfect, see you tomorrow’. So I spent the rest of that weekend doubling as Devin’s arm model for his far cry treat video on Youtube. While I was working on the set with him, I started picking his brain and said ‘Devin, who is doing all these videos?’. He replied ‘You know what? I’m actually looking for somebody right now. I have been doing all this by myself until now’.

So I’ve sent him all my work and said ‘Look, I don’t have the most experience but I can promise you that I will be more passionate and hard-working anybody else can’. He asked ‘What camera do you shoot with?’ And for me being able to reply ‘the exact same gear you do’, it gave him a lot of confidence to hire me. But it wasn’t easy.

Following this, I started working for him for a couple of months working for him for free just to add value to his business. And that’s another principle I live by is ‘Add value first’.  After he saw the value I added, he hired me full-time and I was able to pay back my debts for my equipment purchase.

However, after working for him for 3 years, I left the job because I wanted to continue learning and growing. I then broke up, started my own production company and ‘full-time filmmaker’ class.

After that, I asked all my Youtube followers ‘What do you want to learn from me?’ I received two hundred replies, which I ordered them chronologically from beginning to end. Then, I set up a plan to reply to what people needed to know to become a filmmaker, even if they were complete beginners. For this, I spent the next 6 months to create this full-time filmmaker programme, 20 hours of content.

2-  My top 10 secrets to cinematic FILM shots

Thirdly, let me share with you my cinematic shot secrets.

• Buying the right gear: what camera should I buy?

Well, it completely depends on what you want to shoot and what your budget is.

a) First budget range

If you don’t have any budget, just use your phone. Most smartphones have decent cameras integrated. I can assure you that you can get similar results to that of high budget cameras. If you are using your phone, make sure to use of a manual camera app like FiLMicPRO. It only costs $10 (17 Euros)  that allows you to manually control your image for best results. Also, to get smooth shots, I recommend using a stabiliser. The Zhiyun (Smooth Q) is a good option.

b) Second price range

You can get a DSLR for $600. The best beginner camera I recommend is the Canon SL2. There are other great options like the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G7 Mirrorless with 14-42 mm lens. But I prefer Canon cameras for their amazing in-camera colours, the superior auto-focus and great lens options. However, every camera manufacturer will have pros and cons.

c) Third budget range

If you have around $1000, I’d say look into a nicer lens and stabiliser for your DSLR. Lenses are just as important as the camera bodies. Depending on what you shoot, I’d recommend either getting a wider lens like the Tokina 11-16 mm for Canon cameras, a Canon EF 50 mm f/1.8 or a standard lens like the Sigma 17-50 f/2.8 zoom lens for Canon.

As for the stabiliser, I’d recommend a Glidecam HD-2000 hand-held stabiliser that helps incorporate cinematic movements. You can also get the Zhiyun Crane 2 for a similar price as the Glidecam.

d)  Fourth price range

For around $1000 just for the camera body, you can get a Panasonic Lumix GH4, Canon EOS 80D or the Sony Alpha a6300 Mirrorless. Each grade for different reasons like the sensor size, resolution, frame rate.

At around $2000, I’d say the Panasonic Lumix GH5 is probably the best for a quality image for the price. Or the Panasonic Lumix GH5s for 500$ more and few extra features.  For around $3000, I’d say your best options are the Sony a7S II, which is amazing in low-light for shooting events like weddings, or the Canon EOS 5D Mark IV. Both these cameras are full framed sensors, which give you a more shallow depth of field compared to smaller sensor cameras like the Panasonic GH5.

e) Jumping into $5500 mark, the Canon EOS-1DX Mark II shoots 4K at 60 frames per second (FPS) and has the most amazing in-video auto-focus tracking system on the market. Now if you have outgrown the DSLR world and are looking into getting into the higher grade cinema cameras, a couple of good options would be the Blackmagic Design URSA Mini Pro, the Panasonic AU-EVA-1 and the Canon EOS C200 EF. They are all sitting around $6000-7500. The next one up would be the Red Raven for $6000 body only, a type of camera used to film Hollywood films, like Pirates of the Caribbean.

However, keep in mind that it’s not the camera that makes the most difference but rather the skills and creativity behind the camera. So, I always tell people it is pointless to buy expensive cameras if you have no idea how to use them.

• Choose the right settings: how to get a cinematic look?

1. Shoot at 24 frames per second (fps)

This is what they shoot Hollywood films at and this is what your eyes are used to seeing when it comes to high-quality films. The reason is that it gives a certain motion blur that is easy on the eyes and makes it feel more like a film. If you shoot at 30 frames per second (fps), it looks smoother but it will make it look like more like a soap opera or a news broadcast. They shoot at this speed to make it feel more ‘live’ and less like a film. If you shoot at 60 fps you will convert that to 24 fps in the editing room if you want to create a slow-motion effect.

2. Picture profile settings

A standard profile with sharpness down to zero, your contrast turned down 1, saturation up 1 and colour tone up 1. These settings will give you a super vibrant saturated happy look.

3. Auto White Balance

I highly discourage you from anything auto on your camera. Instead, learn how to use your manual settings. Every light source has a colour temperate. The temperature of the sun during sunrise is 2500 Kelvin-3500 Kelvin. In the auto balance, everything except the sun will look blue. To change this, go and set it manually to 6000K. It will warm everything up and make it look like a true sunset. As a rule of thumb, if you are shooting outdoors with direct sunlight, I’d recommend shooting between 5600 and 6000 Kelvin and if you are indoors, you usually want to be between 3200 and 4000 Kelvin.

4. Auto ISO

Furthermore, avoid using it auto. With this auto setting, you will either expose for the sky and under-expose the subject or under-expose the darkest part of the subject and expose-expose the sky. While choosing the exposure, use this histogram graph. It will tell you if under-exposed (left) or over-exposed (right). If well exposed, it will be spread out evenly throughout the diagram.

• Get smooth shots: how can I get smooth shots?

1. Good balance
2. Lens choice
3. The off hand
4. The way you walk.

1. Good balance

First and foremost, focus on getting a good balance and smooth shots with your Glidecam stabiliser. There are 3 points of balance with your Glidecam: left/right, front/back, top/bottom. The top to bottom is the one people are struggling the most. The way to correct that is by having a drop time between 2 and 3 seconds (not too fast). The drop time is the amount of time it takes for the glide to come from horizontally to vertically. This will prevent the glidecam from swinging back to forth as you walk.

2. The off-hand

Secondly, the off-hand is the biggest key next to your balance. I personally recommend holding the glidecam with your least coordinated hand and stirring the glidecam with your best hand. Do not touch too much the shaft of your Glidecam, the less you will stir the glidecam, the smoother the shots will be.

3. Using the right lens

For starters, I will recommend you use a wider lens (16 mm). This will give you a wider view making less apparent when there’s a camera. As you improve, you can upgrade to a narrower lens (70 mm).

4. The way you walk

Pretend you are carrying a hot cup of coffee across a room and bend your knees to absorb your foot sets.

• Create Movement: how do you make your shots look so dynamic?

So, here are my top 10 Glidecam moves:

1. Push-in shot. This is the most commonly used for establishing shots like real estate, landscape. This is a great alternative to static shots.
2. Pull-out shot. This is something to re-build something in the image.
3. Parallax shot. This is the one I used the most and is my favourite. I move my body in one direction while panning the camera in the opposite direction. This makes you look like the subject stays in the same spot on the frame while everything else around them is moving in the background. It creates movement while focusing on a subject.
4. Rise up shot. This is just going straight up.
5. Reveal shot. That’s when I find something in the foreground to reveal something else in the background.
6. Tilt-down shot. This is when there is something interesting above me. I use it to glide up against to reveal something else below me.
7. Tilt-up shot. I like to use this for intro shots to establish a location in a video or to reveal a character to open up the scene.
8. Change of focus shot. This is when I set up close to my subject. I start further away from my subject (out of focus) and move closer to focus on it (into focus).
9. Tracking shot. Lead tracking, follow-tracking, sidetracking.
10. Transition move shot. This is where I use two different objects from two different scenes. I match the two shots together creating a cool transition making seem like I’ve been from one place to another by using something in my frame.
11. Low mode shot. I turn my camera upside-down, stir my subject up against the sky and giving a fresh new perspective.

• Create depth: what aperture should I shoot at?

In this regard, I personally like filming at aperture 2.8 or lower for most things. The reason being is when you use a low aperture; it knocks the background out of focus and gives a shallow depth of field. This helps the viewer focus better on the subject as the background is blurred. It also looks more cinematic because that shallow depth of field is creating layers and depth to the image.

But, depth can also be created using foreground. When filming, I’m always looking for some foreground to glide up against to make my image feel more 3 dimensional.

Other than that, another tip for creating depth is finding natural leading lines, whatever it is around you, to help you lead your eye to the centre of the image.

• Camera angles: what camera angles should I cover?

1. Let’s start with the 5 angles they will teach you in school:

a) Wide angle for establishing shot

b) Long/full body: a wide shot that covers your subject from head to to

c) Medium shot

d) Tight/close-up which is usually just a face

e) Detail/extreme close-up shot which focuses in on a particular detail.

Of course, you can mix up those angles by doing low angles to show more power or dominance or high angles to show more vulnerability or weakness.

2. 5 shot rule covers 5 angles of the important action

1. Wide shot to establish a location
2. Front using a GoPro
3. Top to give more perspective
4. Side right in the action
5. Back using a GoPro.

Then in the editing room, I can cut between the different angles and piece them together to show the viewer different perspectives. This adds life to your story. You can add some music to make your video look the same scene more dynamic and action-packed.

• Perspective (lens choice): which lens should I use and when?

By far, my favourite one is the widening angle lens (16 mm) for wide group shots, landscapes, real estate to give an impressive look and close-up to action feeling.

The second one is the narrow-angle lens (70-100 mm) to create a better face-tight shot as it’s more flattering and doesn’t destroy facial features. So, when I’m shooting a wedding or a portrait, I always pop up on my standard 24-70 mm lens, as it allows me to get either the wider group in the image (24 mm) or the close-up spouses (70 mm).

My next lens is the 70-200 mm telephoto lens for the times when I can’t get physically close to the subject. I can use the zoom at up to 200-yard distance to focus on the subject (200 mm).

Now, as far as prime lenses go, I go for Sigma Arts series 20-85 mm costing between $800 and 1200 mm.

• Focus: how do you keep subjects in focus while moving?

These are the 4 tips to stay in focus:

1. Get a camera with a good auto-focus tracking like Canon for any predictable moving subject (interview/wedding)
2. Set focus and maintain the same distance to my subject
3. Handheld continuous focus pulling. I will help the glide shaft while moving away or closer to my subject.
4. Use a high aperture between 16 and 22 mm so that everything stays in focus.

• Polarisers: what filters do you use?

I rarely use filters and I’d rather use polarisers. Polarisers make your colours look more vibrant. This gives you the appearance of better dynamic range as it softens those highlights from the sun reflection for outdoor shoots.

At present, the polariser I use is B+W 82 mm HTC Kaesemann circular polarizer with multi-resistant coating costing about $140 depending on the size of your lens.

• Lighting: how do you get the most out of natural light?

3 factors:

1. Time of day.

Indeed, the best time of day to film is during the ‘Golden Hour’. The golden hour is the first hour of the day (sunrise) and last hour of the day (sunset) when the sun is low in the sky. If you shoot at noon when the sun is overhead, it’s much less flattering. The colours outside are less saturated. The harsh sunlight creates hard shadows.

2. Camera direction

Besides, I love shooting in the sun because when you use the sun as your backlight (golden hour), it gives you those beautiful sun flares coming in and out of your image creating a cinematic look. It also creates even more light on the subject faces (no squinting eyes and unflattering faces).

Now and then, I like to have the sun as a frontline source, it’s for landscapes. It gives vibrant colours.

3. Nonetheless, If you can’t wait for the sun to come out and it’s cloudy, don’t just put your camera away

For instance, for weddings, the clouds act as a giant diffuser, which softens the light and creates a more flattering look on people’s faces. So, just figure out to utilise the weather patterns to your advantage. For me, I use the rain and the snow in slow motion creating movement and epic look to my film.

• Bonus secret: editing. What software? Editing tips?

The editing software I use is Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro X. But I’m sure you want to know how to use them.

Hence, here are my post-production tips:

1. Audio is equally important to display a good quality film.

Yet, do not neglect audio. Make sure you are getting close enough to the subject to make sure you are capturing a good quality sound. Also, the sound design added on top of what you recorded that will help everything come to life. You can use stock sounds. Throwing as many layers (sound effects) as you can to help your viewer feels it’s actually there.

2. Choosing the right music

My four go-to music licensing websites:

• Premiumbeat.com
• Audiojungle
• Soundstripe
• Artlist.

Moreover, be patient with finding your piece of music and picks one that helps tell your story best. Additionally, you can also use a list of independent artists.

3. Colour correction and colour grading

– Colour correction:

Within Adobe Premiere Pro, I use a ‘lumitri colour’ in colour effects. Next, I will adjust my white balance using my temperature selector, then adjust exposure if needed, add some contrast and saturation. And last, I’ll go to my RGB curve and create an ‘S’ curve to bring highlights up and shadows down. It helps colours and image pop.

– Colour grading

This will give your footage a specific look or feel. You can do so again within the ‘creative lumitri colours’. These are basically colour grading presets you can choose from to give a look that fits your story. One of the most popular colours grading out there are:

The Orange and Teal look or the Blockbuster look or the Flat Profile or Brown Aqua RMN, Brown Aqua RMN.

Though,  remember, practice makes perfect!

Now, I’d like to talk about how to make money within the film industry.

3- My 6 steps to making money

a) Video Revolution for brands to promote their products:

– Youtube/ Webcam/ Drones…

– Digital Ad Revenue: $9 billion in 2016.

b) Furthermore,  you can set up into any of these film industries. Likewise, there is plenty of variety.

– Events

– Corporate

– Travel

– Independent films

– Luxury Real Estate

– Weddings

– Actions/Sports

– Documentaries

– Business Commercials.

Consequently, don’t give out your dreams because you feel you are too late in the game and the market is over-saturated. There is plenty of work to go around for everybody!

c) Last but not least, here are my 6 steps to making money:

– Invest in yourself: gear, education and time

– Master your skills: what separates you?

– Build a portfolio

– Market yourself

– Build relationships

– Add value first/free to fee: start working for free and then get charged for your work. Do negotiate to be paid at the right price.

Finally, for those who prefer watching a video over reading, please find his webinar below.

To close the topic, do you have any questions? Is there anything you would like me to clarify?

Tips on how to build the perfect Social Media Strategy

I recently attended a really interesting webinar about how to build the perfect Social Media Strategy.

Although some of the information in this post may not surprise you, you will definitely learn a thing or two!

So, let’s start with the Social Media Strategy agenda points. You can then decide to deep dive into what you feel you lack information about.

Join us for a free DATA-DRIVEN training session with our friends @quintly! We’re going to present some brand new research, and talk about building the ideal social strategy.
https://t.co/NPKIbemOZb pic.twitter.com/fI2JqfvdHq

— Mention (@Mention) April 18, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

The first presentation was delivered by Tilo Kmieckowiack from @quintly who talked about:

• What excellent social posts have in common in terms of length, content type and hashtags
• How to write the perfect Social Media post.

The second presentation was delivered by Patrick Whatman from @Mention who dived into Social Media Strategy:

• How to and Why focus on engagement
• Learn from your competitors
• Monitor your campaigns.

1. Let me share with you a bit about Tilo’s background

Tilo is the Brand/Product and Communications Manager of Quintly for the German-speaking markets, i.e Germany, Austria and Switzerland. He works from Cologne, Germany.

His daily job is to create a Social Media Campaign analysis and case studies to optimise the company’s social media strategy. One of the perks of being part of this company is access to a big database. Indeed, the Quintly Marketing team analyses over 10 million posts from Facebook and Instagram per month. In this presentation, he shares his findings of how the perfect social media post looks like.

2. So, let’s start with the Facebook Analysis

a) Data Range analysed

• January 2018
• 239,327 pages
• 11,472,559 posts

b) Analysed Dimensions

• Message length
• Message type
• Date
• Tag 
• Likes
• Comments
• Shares
• Interactions
• Reactions
• Emojis 
• Hashtags #⃣

c) Means of Success: Average Interaction per Post

Results:

• Users most commonly post links, however, videos and also photos receive much more interactions on average
• The Post volume is highest during the week but posts on weekends get more interactions
• Most posts contain either 0 or 30-150 characters. According to the findings, a text of 1-50 characters receives the most interactions
• A large number of posts does not contain emojis. Nonetheless, moderate emoji usage of 1-8 shows higher interactions
• Hashtags are seldom used on Facebook, besides posts without hashtags receive more interactions.

Consequently, what does the ‘perfect’ Facebook post looks like? It looks like this:

• Limits to 50 characters in length
• Uses emojis moderately
• Doesn’t use hashtags
• Is posted at weekends
• Uses videos and images wisely

⚠ Bear in mind that content quality is important, too! This analysis only covers objective technical factors. Analyse your own performance and compare it to the presented results, in order to optimise your own strategy.

3. Now let’s move on to Instagram Analysis

a) Data Range analysed

• January 2018
• 41,389 Instagram profiles
• 1,019,978 posts.

b) Analysed Dimensions

• Message length
• Message type
• Date
• Tag
• Likes
• Comments
• Interactions
• Emojis
• Hashtags

c) Means of Success: Average Interaction per Post

Results:

• Users post images most often, yet videos get the most interactions
• Most posts are published during weekdays. However, posts on weekends receive more interactions
• Most posts contain between 0 and 150 characters, but posts with up to 50 characters get the most interactions
• Many profiles don’t use emojis, yet posts with 1-3 emojis show most interactions
• Most posts contain no or few hashtags. Posts with 1-3 hashtags receive most interactions. Note that with Instagram, you can up to 10 hashtags but you need to ensure that they are relevant to the post.

So, what does the ‘perfect’ post on Instagram looks like? It looks like this:

• Limits to 50 characters in length
• Uses emojis moderately
• Reduces hashtags to max 10
• Is posted mostly at weekends
• Uses videos and carousel wisely

Additionally, you can also check his presentation with graphs on Quintly’s Website.

All in all, Social Media Analytics can help you benchmark your content performance against our analysis.

The second presentation was delivered by Patrick Whatman from @Mention.

1. Now let’s move on to Patrick’s background

Patrick is from New Zealand and works in Paris, France. He is the Digital Content Marketer of Mention. His presentation focuses on Social Media Strategy around the following topics:

• Engagement
• Social Listening 
• Influencer Marketing
• Competitive Analysis
• Data Tracking.

Patrick started off his talk with a fun quiz to make a point about engagement.

2. Do you know the answer to this quiz question?

Q: Who is the most re-tweeted musical artist of all time?

A: BT K-Pop Group with:

• 252 000+ re-tweets
• Winner Billboard for ‘Best Social Artist’ in 2017-2018
• More than 10 million followers
• Performed at 2017 American Music Awards.

3. EVEN SO, why should you care?

This data proves that social media success is closely linked to engagement.

Mention’s Twitter Report 2018 -Top 5 hashtags (for engagement):

1. #Love_Yourself
2. #Jimin
3. #BTS
4. #DNA
5. #THELASTJEDI

Amongst these hashtags, the top 4 are coming from this K-Pop band.

4. YET, how do they do this?

It’s all about engagement. They engage with their fans by:

• Holding contests. They ask their fans to draw, respond, and tell stories about their faves
• Rewarding fans for their re-tweets. They send personal ‘Thank you’ messages
• Creating their own emojis.

Their success lies in the creation of online communities, mainly on Twitter, but also a bit on Instagram and a lot of forums, where fans do all the stuff for them.

5. then, why engagement matters?

It is important to emphasise engagement in your social media campaign because of:

a) The Snowball effect

Indeed, Social Media is all about connections: your followers, their followers…Your message reaches much further if shared with all these connections

b) Platforms reward engagement

Organic Reach is about winning in ‘the feed’. The more likes, shares and comments, the more likely Facebook, Twitter, etc will promote your post for you.

c) Respond early and often to foster a community. This is valid for viral campaigns or simple customer support

• When a social media user gets in touch, you need to be there to help
• Build momentum for key posts and campaigns
• Catch issues before they get out of hand.

d) Social Listening comes in handy

Here are the reasons:

• You can’t respond to messages you don’t know to exist
• You may not be able to stay glued to all your social media account at all times
• Social Listening tools tell you when you (or your keywords) have been mentioned and let you respond directly.

A good Social Listening tool such as Mention saves you time and efforts. It also lets you focus on creating winning campaigns.

6. SINCE SOCIAL MEDIA IS CONSTAnTLY EVOLVING, WOULD YOU CONSIDER a Bot AS PART OF A SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY?

In short, the answer is ‘No’ for Social Media and here is why. On Social Media, bots aren’t necessary or advisable. Unless you are a very big brand, you are not going to miss too many things. However, Social Listening will help you not miss all these little things and details.

Still, if you build or use a bot for your website, make sure you set it up with narrow parameters, it can be a good thing. Though, don’t show too obvious automated responses.

7. CONSECUTIVELY, The next step of YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY success is to work with influencers

Social-power users help build the brand by:

• Expanding your reach (because their customer/fan base is engaged)
• Increasing buying decisions for your products/services through their audiences thanks to their advice
• Making you look good! When you hang out with the cool guys, it makes you look cool, too!

8. NOW, How to get started?

• Find influential users relevant to your business (similar brands/topics within your network). They can be macro-influencers or micro-influencers. This article will help you find cost-free micro-influencers
• Figure out what you can offer: free product, exposure, money
• Reach out to influencers and kindly suggest to work together. Many will say ‘no’ but not everyone.

9. AFTER ALL, Why should you care about what your competitors do?

Because a competitive analysis helps you solve your problems, and understand and learn from your prospects and customers.

It will allow you to easily find out:

• What your customers are interested in
• What content or marketing strategies might be effective
• Possibly even find new customers this way by interacting with them.

10. BESIDES, How can you track campaigns? And why would you bother?

Simply because you need to evaluate with tracking tools for the success of your campaign.

Indeed, the best campaigns are data-driven:

• Learn from your last campaign to optimise the next
• Influential people and outlets talk about you (eg on public holidays when your business may be closed)
• Find out key events in the campaign that affected your performance
• Assess the overall response to the campaign based on factual evidence to build engagement (eg top 10 content pieces per month or year).

11. Last but not least, Patrick shares his top tips

• Use unique and branded hashtags for brand awareness and engagement. Why? Because non-popular branded hashtags are easier to track
• Watch for sudden changes (spikes and dips) and understand why
• Identify your most and least effective content
• Measure key metrics such as volume, reach, countries, languages…

Finally, SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY presentations were wrapped up with Questions and Answers.

Q: Can 15-30 hashtags work?

A: No. You need to concentrate on using relevant hashtags. Bear in mind as well that some hashtags are banned, temporarily or permanently. Let me give you one piece of advice: relevant hashtags in Instagram captions (descriptions). You may add some other hashtags after the description following blank spaces but they may not be as relevant.

Q: Do you think it’s good practice to post the same content on multiple platforms?

A: No. Every platform is different. Cross-posting isn’t recommended. Besides, consider that Twitter has recently changed its rules. They do not allow anymore the same content posted on different Twitter accounts or similar channels. Furthermore, hashtags aren’t been used on Facebook. As for the message length, Twitter restricts messages to 240 characters, which is lower than most other Social Media Networks.

Q: How to better utilise Instagram for stories?

A: Keep an eye on trends and news and be aware of the new features and tools. As discussed previously, stay engaged with informative or funny content. Another important piece of news recently surfaced on Later, the exclusively Instagram scheduling app. They said that the algorithm prioritises people’s different content. Indeed, Instagram can tell and promote brands and people who use all of its features and have varied content (not only the same format or type of content over and over). Thus, they will bring further up your content into the feed. An interesting feature that has been rolled out is Instagram ‘highlights’ on your profile page. You can highlight a particular story to be viewed over and over again without any time limitations.

Q:  What channels do you advise focusing on?

A: That depends on the market(s) you are working for. You need to adjust your strategy to the country/market specifics. For eg, in Germany, there are very few people using Twitter, while there are 30 million users on Facebook.  Twitter is quasi-exclusively used by journalists and politicians. However, journalists can pick up topics to write about, which will be brought to the mass media. So, Twitter shouldn’t be completely written off.

Personalised customer experience through Artificial Intelligence

LET’S START WITH THE FIRST Presentation by Paul Sweeny from Webio, An ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE VOICE BOT APP company

1. Conversational Interfaces have started to shift

• First of all, people live inside their Messaging Apps. Can you prove it? I surely can!
  • 2 billion messages a month are exchanged between customers and businesses
  • 60 billion businesses are on Facebook Messenger
  • Children are on: Snapchat, Kik, Telegram, Instagram
  • And Apple Business Chat just launched!

Yet, why is the Artificial Intelligence getting so popular?

That’s because Artificial Intelligence picks up customers/users’ moods. Some places like Melbourne, Australia have already developed a strong Chatbot community.

However, can you provide me with a relevant example of Artificial Intelligence use and success?

Moreover, Artifical Intelligence tools (AI) such as Alexa, the smart speaker, enable companies to increase their sales.

Indeed, in the USA alone, 57% of the population has ordered an item through their Smart Speaker.

Additionally, 37% say that they spend more money on Amazon and Google since getting their Smart Speaker.

On top of that, it also creates opportunities for technology-driven services such as Alexa programmes designed for children costing $2 a month that can be embedded into the TV.

2. SO, WHAT ARE The top 3 categories of items ordered most through Alexa?

They are:

• Smart Home
• Games, Trivia and Accessories
• Music and Audio.

3. THEN, The REcepTionist/Triage Bot will determine if the issue can be processed by the bot or BY HUMAN BEING

The bot will follow these 3 stages:

1. HLP (Help) = What is the intent of the sentence?
2. Triage = Who/what division is it for?
3. Rules = Best Route… Human, Bot or both.

Besides Alexa, are there any other current applications of bots?

Of course! Some other examples of Bot usage are:

• the ‘Uber’ taxi app linking drivers directly with customers
• hotel booking sites allowing smarter offers for customers searching for accommodation on the sites…

4. CONSEQUENTLY, WHAT MUST A Today’s Check-out DO?

It must:

• understand and manage customer intents
• hold context
• reinvent a new dynamic when it comes to SEO, Words, Sentences’ choices
• create continuous conversations without interruptions
• enable direct digital conversations. Why not have platforms for these?
• Finally, it must cater for markets and conversations. Indeed, markets are conversations and conversations are about markets.

NOW, LET’S MOVE ON TO THE SECOND Presentation by Niamh Parkless (on the right) from Shopless.ie, AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SHOPPING AND DELIVERY APP company

1. FIRST OF ALL, WHAT IS Shopless.ie? IT is A new commitment personal shopping and delivery app DESIGNED for:

• Fashion
• Health and Beauty
• Groceries

Secondly, what is the aim of this app?

Its goal is to attract local brands to deliver within 2-3 hours to your home. If you are a non-local brand, the aim is to reduce the shopping and delivery times. In other terms, it is a one-stop personalised application working with Artificial Intelligence to assist you with your shopping needs.

But, why do you think it will help my brand/business?

2. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE and Personalisation

• According to a recent report from Accenture, 75% of consumers are more likely to buy from a retailer that:
  • recognises them by name
  • recommends options based on past purchases
  • or knows their preferences.
• Research suggests that brands with strong omnichannel engagement have an average retention rate of 89% versus 33% for brands with weak engagement.

However, what are your recommendations for a successful implementation of Artificial Intelligence?

3. THERE ARE TO FOLLOW THESE Five Easy Steps for Better Personalisation via Artificial intelligence:

1. Don’t involve third-party software, just start small. Just amend a small part of your site to show customers’ location
2. Personalise your shoppers’ mass marketing campaigns as your customers’ questions. You can ask simple questions like age, gender and brand interest
3. Use on-site development to automate personalisation
4. Real-Time marketing personalisation. This involves customising ad content based on individual users
5. Last but not least, focus on achieving a seamless personalisation across web and marketing channels. That is to say that your Marketing messages must be created for your clients based on what you already know about the person’s integrations with your company.

4. Finally, how is it going to meet my business goals?

• Well, when it comes down to it, personalisation comes back to improving the customer journey and their experience
• In conclusion, it’s a way for stores to:
  • differentiate their service,
  • reward loyal customers
  • build a more sustainable business.

FINALLY, LET’S FINISH UP WITH THE THIRD Presentation BY Emma Boylan from outside the box

At last, Emma talked about branding and personal branding to market yourself effectively. For this purpose, I will refer you to this previous article for more information.

 

How to optimise your website performance for marketers and developers

WEBSITE PERFORMANCE

I signed up for a Learn Inbound Marketing event a few months ago and I must say the content of the Website Performance – A marketing priority presentation was outstanding! It also complements very well my previous blog post on how to understand your website traffic data with Google Tag Manager.

This presentation delivered by Emily Grossman is divided into 6 topics:

1. Definition and importance of web performance to marketers

2. Why might it be valuable for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)?

3. Why do we suck at this?

4. Measuring performance

5. Auditing performance through Lab tests and Real User Metrics tests (RUM)

6. Optimising your site, your UX (user experience) and your Business.

If you prefer listening to a podcast than reading, please find the presentation recording below.

If you have a more visual memory, you will find the podcast transcript and PDF presentation further in this article.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

1.Definition and importance of web performance to marketers

• Definition

What is web performance? Performance is the speed in which web pages are downloaded and displayed on the user’s web browser. Web Performance Optimisation (WPO) or website optimisation is the field of knowledge about increasing web performance.

• Why is that important to marketers?

Let’s go back to Maslow’s modernised hierarchy of needs with Wifi access added to the pyramid. People feel that slow wifi is worse than no wifi at all. Waiting for something to load is stressful and annoying. And as marketers in general, we try not to piss off the people, who make us money. So you can see why this might be a problem.

But even if we look at it quantitatively, this could be a really big problem, like 10% of your audience lost. Luckily, the flipside of this is that when we do well with delivering great experiences to our customers at a fast pace, they also reward us. We get:

• an increase in our conversion rate and engagement
• a decrease in bounce rates in orders on the e-commerce site
• an increase in conversions amongst new customers.

This can translate to real money. It can an increase in revenue and in customer spending.  So performance can really be valuable for marketers.

2. Why might it be valuable for SEO?

In terms of SEO, earlier this year, people announced something called the ‘speed update‘. Basically, it is a new update to the algorithm that adds a ranking impact to sites based on the site’s speed in mobile search results for the first time.

However, this update only impacted slow sites. The idea was that if you were really slow, you might get demoted. If you were super fast, it wouldn’t impact you. Actually, I would say, the speed of your site performance is critical for searches because it impacts their experience in an interesting way when viewing a search contact.

If you imagine that all the sites in Google are like products in a grocery shop, you’ll know that your competitors are right next to you in breathing. If your product is broken and busted, leaking all over the place, nobody wants to deal with it. Not only will you lose that customer but they will probably put money right into the pocket of your competitors who are lurking there.

So, there are tons of reasons to care about performance. As marketers, you would think that the web would be blazingly fast but that’s not true. In fact, Nicola did this incredibly intensive study in the UK. She looked at 1000 of the top UK domains and found that a lot of them were really struggling.

They were struggling to provide an interactive experience to the users in less than 10 seconds. Irish websites can be on this struggle bus, too, at getting a navigation up to users in a reasonable amount of time on different networks.

3. Why do we suck at this?

It’s hard. A developer evangelist posted a blog post detailing all the challenges that the developers are going through right now in 2018. A huge section is about optimising a website for performance.

I’d like to focus on 2 main issues:

• Developers don’t know what the goals they need to aim for are.

Indeed, developers do not have all the information about their user base and the impact their decisions have on them. But marketers love user base data collection and impacts.

• How do we fix slow web performance?

Today, I would like to talk about involving marketing in this conversation around measuring performance, auditing performance and optimising performance.

4. Measuring WEBSITE performance

Measurements are just actually a proxy for feelings. But how do we know what a fast experience feels like? Can we associate that with something else?

Google has done a good job at labelling what kinds of things users might be looking for, indicators that things are moving along quickly and fastly from experience.

They want to know: ‘Is it happening? Is it useful? Is it usable?’ If we understand that these are our users’ expectations, we can start to associate various measurements with those feelings. Those measurements might have interesting different names, things like ‘First Contentful Paint’, ‘First Meaningful Paint’, ‘Time to Interactive’.

But what we are really trying to figure out for these users is: ‘Do they know that it is happening? Do they know that it is useful? Do they know that it’s usable?’

As marketers, getting involved in these conversations allows us to make our measurements truly meaningful to us when we get them back to our engineers. It also helps engineers to know:

‘What matters at the marketing level? Does this content need a picture loaded for it to feel meaningful or is that image irrelevant?’ These are the kinds of decisions we have to make hand-in-hand with our developers.

5. AUDITING WEBSITE PERFORMANCE

We know what we want to measure but how do we do that? This is very tricky and in general in-performance optimisation tasks. For this, we are looking at and going to do two different kinds of measurements:

• Lab tests or simulated tests
• Real User Metrics tests (RUM).

• Lab tests sometimes referred to as ‘simulated tests’.

There are lots of different tools that will allow you to do these lab tests. Basically, what you are doing is inputting a URL. Then, you are getting out some information from a simulated test environment. There’s a machine somewhere that says:

‘We are going to try and simulate what a user might experience over various different connections or the connection that you set yourself. We will give you back some results.’

You might get back something like this from a Lab test. It’s a set of ‘timings’ that are going to indicate some of the measurement that we talked about before. You can certainly set those up yourself as well.

You might also get what looks like a film strip. The ‘film strip’ shows you what is visually happening while those calculations are made. In the case of webpage test, which is the tool I’m using to show you information.

Another alternative is to get ‘waterfall‘. It allows you to view large sites/pages. Those little bars show you the requests you made. You can see that in a lot of cases, there’s a lot of Javascript, some CSS and some images. These are the building blocks that make up your site. These tools can help you segment each individual request so that you know how long each request is taking.

So, there is a benefit in running lab test. There’s almost no set up required. You can input a URL and go, which means it’s also very easy to track your competitors.

Because you can test pages before they launch, you can see how certain pages are going to run ahead of time. You can also do interesting tasks with the controlled ‘variables‘.  So, if you want to test something before it goes live like adding or removing something, you can see what happens.

You don’t have to deal with other variables in the real world. You can also test for things on multiple networks and compare how things changed when you moved to, say, a 4G network connection to a 3G network connection.

However, the problem with these lab tests is that they can be hard to scale and keep current. We are doing everything at the URL level. They can be automated but it takes some manual labour. You often have to run multiple tests to get some real results.

So, in webpage test, for eg, we’ll run 3 tests and take the median results, to get rid of our data layers. Because there are no variables, we have issues understanding the real impact on our users. If we are testing on 4G but 75% of our users access the internet through a 3G connection, how much is that telling us?

It can also be really difficult to measure these pages when they are dynamic. When they are having ads changing sizes, we are also not getting an understanding of how things look like for users. What we are testing with our users is their experience. It’s actually what we were talking about with Google Tag Manager (GTM) before. We want to track how far our user gets down our page with GTM.

• Real User Metrics tests (RUM)

With Real-User Performance Monitoring, we want to check how far along the loading process our users are getting. So, the deal you get back gets a little bit different.

Suddenly, your performance metrics are not a single number but a widespread of numbers. You can break these down by dividers but there’s no real way around it. You are going to get a lot bigger spread of numbers when you look at real users.

Sometimes it’s easier to break down this data into a table. For eg, in this table, we can see that 10% of our users are struggling to get time to interact in less than 12.6 seconds. This is the kind of information we can use to truly understand what is going on with our user base in a real-world context.

There are pros and cons to this table.

• Pros:

The pros are the inverse of the lab tests. It’s very scalable. It’s great for seeing the customer pains in real-time. We don’t have to run the test every so often, it just comes in as our users do.

• Cons:

This is going to require a lot more engineering support to set up. You have to load some software, put some ‘event tracking‘ to understand what’s happening. You also have to deal with the ‘survivorship bias‘. This is an issue, where for us to understand how long it took somebody to get time to interact, you actually have to get to ‘time to interactive’.

If your webpage is so slow that people are willing to weed it out, you are not going to get these data points as they are waiting for the page to load. This is important to understand and measure against your lab tests as well. There are also some issues with variables. There are a lot more processes involved with this data in your marketing procedure.

But if you are thinking it may be nice to look at this RUM data and the lab testing together, then you would be right. In fact, most organisations that do some sort of ongoing performance optimisation will involve a cycle like this. Where they will write code, test it in the lab to make sure that it meets their standards. Then they’ll deliver it to their users, validate that data with RUM to make sure that users are experiencing the lift they predicted in the lab.

I also think it’s important to combine your lab and RUM test when it comes to auditing. And here is why.

When you think about what your developers can do right now, they can add it to a lab test data. They can understand what are the real users’ pains but also what we do think this website could be. Where are the potential issues that we are seeing in our lab tests? Remember that the developers could potentially do that and what they really need is information from ourselves about who our users are, what our user base looks like and the impact of their potential changes.

So, if you can, later on, look for the analytics information about:

• the traffic to your site or maybe more specifically
• the search traffic to your site
• your conversion rates and maybe even your click-through-rate (CTR) from your search console.

You would then start understanding what’s important and start helping developers to prioritise. You could also develop with them an ‘efforts’ squad. This made-up squad will help you understand how much work it will take to improve your performance on those various pages.

Then, at the end of your audit, you have an understanding of how bad shit sucks, but also what are the most important pieces of content/page templates/URLs for you to try and fix first.

Today, I hope that you are able to understand that performance isn’t just about improving your site speed. This is only part of the performance optimisation process.

6. Optimising your  website – actual speed

I also want to open your mind to the idea that site optimisation can be about optimising your business and its processes. this will ensure that over time you develop a culture that is going to prioritise improving your performance metrics.

Now, when you are working on optimising your performance in your organisation, most of you are not going to be coding these improvements yourself. You are going to be working with a development team.

How to not motivate your developers:

The number one thing not to do with developers is just giving them tasks, assignments and they’ll resent you forever.

How to motivate your developers:

Remember that developers are problem-solvers. So, if you frame your request as a problem statement instead of a command, you have much more success with your development team. Let them in on your goals, give them access to your users’ information. That’s what they want and need to be empowered and successful.

But if you are worried about what they are going to do when they get their hands on the site and start working on this goal of improved performance:

‘it mostly boils down to ship less stuff to your customers and what you do ship, try and deliver it in an optimal order.’

I love this quote by Patrick Meenan, creator of webpagetest.org because you go and read decades-old books on performance optimisation, so much of them still hold true.

I also want to spend some time talking about some of the noddy requests that, we, as marketers, will make to our development teams. Because I want to make sure we are aware of the performance impact of those requests so that when we are making those requests, we understand what we are asking them to do.

Images are still the number one cause of bloat on the web because we love images. If you would like to know what it is like to optimise images on your site, please read this extensive guide. We read it all through and find all the different ways the developers have had to clean up after us in our giant image requests. It’s really interesting.

But let’s move to something called ‘Third-Party Scripts‘. They are translated as things like ads, analytics, widgets, things that can be embedded into any sites that come from a 3rd party source. We, marketers, love to pop things into a website.

But remember that asking developers to do this is like asking them to put a loudspeaker on a finely tuned car. You can optimise the car as much as you like. It’s not going to fix the fact that there’s a loudspeaker on top. So, the real question we need to ask ourselves as marketers is: ‘Do we really need the loudspeaker?’ Before we go and make supplementary requests, we need to be aware that developers can’t always control what it will do on the other end.

Now, a few days ago, someone in the SEO space made a great post about how we can go into the development tour’s part of Chrome and check how many requests from our site are actually coming from third-party scripts.  Through Chrome Dev, you can also run a site speed. You can see on a simulated test how much site speed improvement do we get from turning those off. When you do this, you’ll probably figure out just how much pain your users are feeling, not because of these extra scripts you keep adding to your site.

This is something you can also do on webpage test. You can see in side-by-side ‘film strip views’ how fast your site might get without your scripts. You can then go back and look out all the things you’ve requested on your site and clean them up.

The other thing that can be sometimes an issue with third-party scripts is when they are rendered blocking. ‘Render Blocking Scripts‘ are special. They prevent the webpage from being displayed until they are downloaded and processed themselves. They are like roadblocks that come in and say ‘Wait for me, I’m important’.  You might actually want your CSS to be rendered blocking because you don’t want your users to see a flash of unstyled text. You want them to see it the way it’s supposed to look.

But there are some other scripts we sometimes add to our sites that shouldn’t be render blocking, as they cause huge delays. Some of those are ‘A/B Testing Scripts‘.  Most A/B Testing tools will default to being rendered on the client’s side. What this means is your website says’ Hey, there’s a user here we want us to send the website test’. And then they go and get the website from the server. Then, the server comes into the browser and says ‘Hey, I’ve got the website’. The browser then edits the site. It inserts the Javascript it’s using to make changes to the site and then renders it for the user. This part can take some time to be executed.

The other option that you might have is something called ‘Server-Side Experimentation’. If you are doing A/B Testing, you want to see if this is an option for you because it can cut down substantially on load times. In this case, the experiment decisions are made. Then, when it gets sent back to the browser, the browser doesn’t have to submit extra processing time making that decision.

Another thing I want to briefly mention is that Google Tag Manager can also sometimes be rendered blocking. If you want to make sure that the decisions you are making in your GTM aren’t going to cause delays to your site, you need to make sure that not only is the Tag Manager loaded asynchronously (not render blocking) but also that all the things it’s doing aren’t  going to block render as well.

The other thing that you might come across as a marketer are these very interesting new websites entirely built with Javascript frameworks. They have fun names such as React, Angular, Amber, Preact… You might consider working with your developing team to figure out whether they should do something called ‘Client-Side Rendering‘ (CSR) or ‘Server-Side Rendering‘ (SSR).

• Client-Side Rendering

I’d like to talk about the impact this has on loading. In a CRS situation, the servers are responsible for the browser. The browser downloads the Javascript and executes it. The whole page is now viewable and interactive.

• Server-Side Rendering

SSR can be a little bit different.in this instance, the server is already sending some rendered HTML to the browser. The browser can then render. The browser downloads the Javascript executes it and now the page in interactive. It’s important to think about how you might perceive the SSR approach to be faster (image shows up sooner). But we have to remember that there is a potentially a delay between when the content is viewable and when the page is interactive. This means that you can get something that looks like a visually ready page but when you tap on a button, it’s actually not responding to you.

This is the problem we sometimes run into with SSR content. To solve this, we need to do something called ‘Code splitting‘, which essentially breaks out that Javascript into small pieces. This will focus on executing one piece of inactivity at a time so that we can load something much faster than that whole Javascript file.

The other things you can do are optimising for that ‘Repeat Views‘. So, if someone hits your website for the first time, there’s not a lot of things you can do to serve them. But what if they are coming back for the second time? It is possible for us to change things so that we don’t actually have to go back to the Internet every single time we want to get ‘assets‘? can we actually save that information on their device?

There’s a new technology called ‘Service Worker‘ API.  It is about to be supported in Safari and allows us to do just that. With the ‘Service Worker’, you can actually intercept those requests and store some items in your Service Worker cache. Then, if the user needs them again, we can just go to the cache. This can save a lot of repeated load time.

The last thing I want to leave with you in this section is a process called ‘Resource Hinting‘. It is using our users’ downtime to start downloading assets we know they are going to need for the next page.

So, imagine you own a business that sells cat toys and you have a giant page of cat toys. You know that at the end of that page, the user is probably going to click on your check-out page that contains a giff image. You like that image and don’t want to sacrifice it. But you think nobody is getting to my check-out page from anywhere else. They have to be on the resale cat toys page first. So, while the user is spending time browsing back, can I start to download that cat giff for the next page and just save it until they click that button? Yes, you can and that’s through something called ‘Resource Hint‘. If you can predict where the user is going to go next, you can actually start downloading assets for that next page ahead of time and save them.

7. Optimising UX – user perception

I talked about how measurements are proxy for feelings and in some cases, we may have difficulty influencing those metrics. But if we can impact the user’s feelings, that’s still ok. We may bypass the proxy but we can still read the end results., the improved conversions and engagement…

So, I want you to think about two different kinds of queues you have been in your life. There’s a queue that moves really slow and another one that moves really fast. I think about two processes.  I think about when I am at Dublin airport and have to wait for an hour and a half. There’s a painfully long process versus when I go to a restaurant in London. In fact, the quoted waiting time is the exact same in the airport and in the restaurant.

The difference is that at the restaurant they shuffle you in different places: outside, sitting down in a place inside, then going to the bar to have a drink. Then they send you to a different bar before sitting you at a table. By the time you are done, you think ‘Hey, that is really fast’. but isn’t. It’s just that you are constantly in an active state. Things are still happening. If you are still walking and moving into that queue, you feel like it gets fast, even if you are waiting just as long. You can use this same tactic when it comes to your users.

So, the next time you log into Slack, think about what Slacks does when they shuffle you through different states. When they put you in an active state, they are making you forget how long it’s actually taking for their product to load.

This is also the same principle behind skeleton screen, you get this kind of flash of something that looks like content and it changes our mind. You start thinking ‘Hey, maybe I’m ready for content now’. It gives you just that extra to time to get users into a state to make them feel they are not waiting that long. But on an even more practical level, your standard progress bars can feel slower or faster depending on how they are designed. There’s a great study with stylised different progress bars. They track users ‘ perception based on those progress bars. They found out when they animated backwards bars on the progress bars, they felt faster to users than the standard progress bars.

8. Optimising your business – priorities and process

The last thing I want to touch on is how to optimise your business for future success. It’s really important for your business that you rally everyone behind this effort.

So, that means you have to simplify your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). You must understand everything you want to measure. But what are the two KPIs that really affect your bottom line? When you associate them with money, to make sure that everybody in your organisation understands how important 200 milliseconds really means. Once you have this culture of everybody in the organisation knowing how important these 200 milliseconds are, you will find that people will start asking questions like ‘Can we afford it?

When the marketing team wants a script implemented, everybody wants to know ‘What does that do to our load time? How much is that going to cost us in users?’

When you have those situations where you can’t compromise, you have to compromise on something that isn’t performance. That can be really challenging. But ultimately when you are able to tie your performance decisions back to your bottom line, that’s something you can do. Even the BBC says that in peak use times when their servers are overloaded and things are getting incredibly slow, they are willing to sacrifice a lot of marketing features on their site for the sake of performance. Tha’s because they know that one second added is 10% of their audience.

So, I hope you can start thinking about what time can mean to you. Does it mean 300 000 $ in revenue? Does it mean 800 million £ every year in increased customer spending? How much are you leaving on the table by not investing in performance?

Finally, for those who would like to download the PDF document containing more visuals and her contact details, click on the link below:

Web performance PDF presentation